First Things
December 26, 2005
Maybe it is just me, but it seems that as Fr. Neuhaus has settled into his editor emeritus position, his opinions have become much more measured and insightful on the few (offhand I’d say about three) subjects with which I have usually found myself disagreeing with him. I will mention two of these.
The first concerns the war in Iraq. Perhaps a retractione in the Latin and French sense, Fr. Neuhaus’s recent “Iraq and the Moral Judgement” outlines a position with which I substantially agree, although he still seems to be going with the idea that there was some link between Iraq and the attacks on the World Trade Center, which I have thought entirely implausible since the beginning of “Operation Save Iraq from Itself.” (This is a point that rather problematizes Fr. Neuhaus’s otherwise reasonable attempt to delineate the spheres of competence of moralists and statesmen. Both require certain facts and “intelligence.” When those facts are in dispute, that is a large problem.)
But neither do I like the way this point (i.e., “Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11”) is harped on as a kind of trump-card by certain people–one of those odd trump cards that at once gives a person a sense of moral and intellectual superiority that is both confounded and strangely nurtured by the evident failure of Elmer Gantry red-staters to “get a clue” and perceive that they have “lost the hand,” so to speak or have been hornswoggled by “their” president.
What this “false link” piece of information does in different hands is quite interesting, sociologically speaking. My theory is that popular Republican opinion among the rank and file is that there was no literal Saddam-Osama link and that the existence of such a link was always, obviously tenuous. Further, even the reddest of red-state country bumpkins tends to understand it is the duty of politicians to hornswoggle them–a not really ignorant but rather complicit populace that realizes on different levels that after being attacked, shooting back at a superficially related yet conveniently available enemy has certain benefits. (Here I am not talking about the usefulness of a non-Saudi staging area in the middle east for the American military in a century that may justify the peak-oil theory. All this is worth considering, however. I especially recommend the discussion at James Howard Kuntsler’s blog.)
Politicial opinion from politicians and also the “man on the street” should never be taken too literally. Most people on the left and the right are (often prudently) unwilling if they are not unable to talk turkey about American interests in a Machiavellian world. (I could be wrong; Americans do seem to have many different conflicting desires to be both loved and feared.) This goes for Fr. Neuhaus himself, who still seems to be largely a Constantinian in denial about the imperial nature of the American Imperium. (This too is interesting–how individuals respond to this particular symbolization.) Unfortunately Neuhaus’s critics (and critics of the war in general) have not clarified the situation much by using “empire” as a pure evil, an attack label.
The second subject I wish to mention is the status of popular Protestantism in the US–the so-called “Evangelicals.” In the past my sense has been that Fr. Neuhaus has been insufficiently attentive to how this politically useful bloc is, on its present course, too preeningly triumphalistic, ecclesiologically weak, doctrinally fissiparous, and culturally accomodationistic in ways that it is blind to–and seemingly Neuhaus as well–to be a strong and sustainable force for order and a renewed, clothed public square. A number of recent musings by Fr. Neuhaus indicate I was wrong about his views, that he has changed his mind somewhat, or else he is now at greater liberty to share certain concerns of this nature. There are many examples, but I will cite only a few. One is a remark nearly identical to ones I made (see the second to last paragraph here) about one of John Wilson’s editorials for Books & Culture which performs a petty but revealing maneuver common to learned Evangelical college professor types, many of their attitudinal offspring, and the Jim Wallis crowd which finds much purchase in those quarters. The maneuver is called “narrow-escape syndrome,” a useful Neuhausian coinage. (I note in passing that several new narrow-escape, “I was a 78-pound fundamentalist bonehead” memoirs have been published and advertised recently in such periodicals as Books & Culture.)
A more significant example of Fr. Neuhaus’s grasp of the fundamental problems and challenges facing Evangelicals today is his latest blog musing which responds to Mark Noll’s Is the Reformation Over? and resembles a recent review of that book in FT. (I might also mention Neuhaus’s comments on The Evangelical Moment.)
As for Joseph Bottum, when people ask me what I think of him, I say I don’t know what to make of him. He is a cipher, an enigma who seems to specialize in contrived contrarian essays on improbable topics that it is hard to take seriously. Does he really think so badly of T. S. Eliot and get him so wrong? Does he literally see P. G. Wodehouse as an antidote to Nietzsche? Is he really a Girardian liberal? Does he really buy his own argument against capital punishment? Does his neo-Nashian poetry deserve top billing?
This is First Things in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Comedy in Harper’s | Next: Save Limbo | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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