They're Off and Running!

It is one of the many unfortunate oddities of the way our presidential election process has been "reformed"over the past 40 years that it now consists of two (lengthy) phases - the primary/caucus phase and the general election phase - with the traditional party conventions largely vestigial relics of their formerly significant selves. Be that as it may, with yesterday's big primaries - particularly in New Jersey and California - the first phase has finally (mercifully) ended. Now the two real candidates are off and running.

To no one's surprise - except, I suppose, to those millennials (and others who should know better) who live in Sanders' fantasyland, Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic party's nomination, awaiting only the formal ratification of the primary process by the party's convention in Philadelphia. In her victory speech last night, she set the stage for the stark choice facing the country this year. Speaking of America as "a big-hearted, fair-minded country," she effectively expressed the fundamental and long-term difference between the two political parties, what they value, and whose interests they seek to serve. And so defined the coming campaign.

Reading Augustine at the Summit

Remembering that today is the 39th anniversary of my graduate school graduation, I began the day by re-reading the famous letter which Petrach (1304-1374) wrote to his spiritual director, the Augustinian friar Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, recounting his ascent of Mount Ventoux on April 26, 1336. Its appeal (and the reason I have long linked it with my graduate academic career) was that the climb, undertaken to fulfill Petrarch's own desire for its own sake - "the impulse to accomplish what I had always wanted to do" - culminated in a meditation on the direction of his life, a meditation guided by words of Saint Augustine, from a copy of Augustine's Confessions which Petrarch claimed always to keep with him on his person.

I don't climb mountains, and i don't literally carry Augustine's Confessions with me wherever I go. But my studies were for me like Petrarch's long-desired climb, and they did lead me to a special friendship with Saint Augustine, which continues in ever enriching ways. Like Petrarch, I too have experienced the Saint's ever so powerful words almost as if they were addressed directly to me. And so it is always when we learn from experience anything important about God or the world, we learn something important about ourselves in the process.

So annually on this anniversary, with the increased benefit of manifold experience and lots of hindsight, I make my own Petrarch's prayer that my thoughts may "now turn at last to the One, the Good, the True, the stably Abiding."

Religious Subculture in a Fractured Society

Notwithstanding the challenging economic transformations of what Yuval Levin (The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Liberalism) calls "our age of fracture," he considers the cultural transformations to have been even more so. "The postwar diffusion of American life began in the culture and has proceeded furthest there, and the accompanying economic and political changes have in many cases been responses to vast changes in mores, norms, beliefs, social expectations, and mental habits."

Levin covers familiar ground, e.g., the loss of common television programs once watched by 2/3 of the nation now leaving us "with less in common at every level of our culture." He notes how even the few "still relevant elite institutions" promote cultural and moral individualism. The challenge is especially serious for what he calls "institutions of moral formation," whose proper (and increasingly counter-cultural) task is "to shape and structure our desires rather than to serve them."

Examining religion, Levin notes something the implications of which have only recently been widely recognized. That is the changing attitudes not of the highly committed but of those of more nominal religious affiliation, those who in the past would have identified at least formally with traditional religious values, but who now feel freer to reject them. Because in the past social conservatives could presume more commonly shared values in society, they tend today to come across as trying to enforce a once widely shared consensus that no longer exists. They do this instead of highlighting a desirable moral ideal and trying to convert people to it.

In my experience, this has long been a criticism of how some Christians, for example, have conducted themselves over several decades of cultural warfare - which they have now largely lost, without apparently learning any lessons from the experience. It could be argued that Pope Francis' apparent attempt to reset the style of Roman Catholic participation in these debates reflects a similar insight to Levin's.

Of course, culture war over-reach characterizes both sides. Levin sees the controversy over mandatory insurance coverage for contraception as an example of such over-reach on the Left - "a culture war of choice initiated by the president." In general, he regards this as one of the disadvantages of our increasing tendency to remove such issues from the legislative arena - which requires persuasion and compromise - in favor of judicial resolutions, which cause both sides "to paint their opponents as irrational, and to deny that their concerns have merit." 

Levin warns both sides agains over-reach and bullying, which American history shows usually tend to alienate the public in the end .

So what, positively, does he recommend as an alternative strategy for religious subcultures? 

Fist of all, he stresses the need for belief in "a vision of the good life and a deep conviction that it would be good for everyone." While "religious liberty" is important, he regards it as important primarily not as an inward-focused, defensive end in itself, but rather as a precondition for being able to appeal to the larger society with precisely such "a vision of the good life and a deep conviction that it would be good for everyone." In the absence of a now lost ability to dominate the culture, religious subcultures need to offer "living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age."

If this sounds suspiciously like Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option," Levin considers what he is proposing to be by comparison a "more aspirational form of the quest for moral community." The model for the "Benedict Option" was, after all Saint Benedict's 6th-century response to a world order which was literally coming apart. Levin's perspective is less apocalyptic. "The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then build out the American ethic from there."

What is key here is the idea of building out - rooted in the fact that such alternative subcultures seek "to embody ideals that their members take to be best for everyone, not just for themselves." That, of course, is the classic aspiration of a church - as opposed to a sect.

Levin believes that, as an alternative to radical individualism, his vision should appeal even to those (such as myself) who are still strongly attracted to more traditional social cohesion. Levin is convinced that "in a nation as large as ours, it is not possible to live in actual community with the entire society." So "what is required to address the particular excesses and troubles of our age is a new rootedness that will be communal before it is national."

Apart from his dismissal of the possibility of truly national community, I believe Levin's analysis has much to commend it. However committed one may be to recreating as much national cohesion as possible, it probably is always going to be the case that effective cohesion is more likely to be achieved within comprehensible communities. Consider, for example, the Catholic Church, which, prior to its existence in local Churches, is first and foremost a universal Church both in principle and in its aspirations. Yet it should escape no one's notice that the day-to-day life of that universal Church - and much of the vibrancy it displays - exist primarily in comprehensible communities. In the Church's case, such communities are primarily parishes (and also for their members religious institutes), which is where most of the action is, so to speak. To be authentically Catholic, parishes and religious institutes must remain connected to the universal Church and must nurture in their members a sense of wider global connectedness. Still, the day-to-day life of the members is formed and experiences primarily in those locally comprehensible communities.

It will, therefore, largely depend less on political action and more on the character and quality of such communities - subcultures in terms of the larger national culture - how effectively religious witness will influence the larger society.  

"God has visited his people"

When St. Paul wanted to make his case to the Christian community in Galatia, he felt the need to introduce himself, to talk about his background, and to make the case for his authority in terms of how he came to be an apostle. The same was true for many of the Old Testament prophets – but not, it seems, for the prophet Elijah. One of the most famous and important prophets in all of Israel’s history, Elijah just appeared on the scene with no such introduction, to reprimand the wicked King Ahab.  His arrival coincided with a severe drought, which led him to seek the hospitality of a certain poor widow. For a year Elijah’s presence had been a blessing for the widow and her only son. Then suddenly the son got sick and died. Not much repayment for her hospitality!

Nowadays it is divorce, which is more often the ticket to poverty for women and children. In the ancient world, it was being left a widow without a man to provide for her that often led to poverty and destitution – as it often still did in our own society before Social Security and Medicare. So no wonder the widow was angry at Elijah and Elijah’s God! Even Elijah seemed to take her side. He called out to the Lord, “will you afflict even the widow with whom I am staying by killing her son?” But then the Lord heard his prayer, and Elijah was able to return the boy alive to his mother.

Elijah is remembered for many things. One of them is this story of his compassion for this widow. Jesus himself mentioned it in his hometown synagogue in one of the early episodes of his public life. Unlike the story of Elijah and the widow, we don’t know what in particular may have brought Jesus to a city called Nain, where he was greeted at the city gate by yet another grieving widow, mourning her only son. It was (to borrow St. Augustine’s famous phrase) a case of misery meeting up with mercy. As far as we know, Jesus had no prior connection with the widow. Unlike Elijah, had not benefited from her hospitality. In that sense, he didn’t really owe her anything. But that didn’t block his compassion. And it was that compassion, in fact, which created a connection between them. Moved with pity for her, he touched the coffin, and said, “Young man, I tell you arise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

Both these events were revelations of God. In Elijah’s case, the widow declared: “The word of God comes truly from your mouth.” At Nain, the crowd exclaimed “A great prophet has arisen in our midst” and “God has visited his people.” These incredibly miraculous events identified Elijah and Jesus as true prophets, great prophets, who embodied God’s word, and revealed God’s power. But more than power, they revealed God’s presence, his nearness. “God has visited his people.”

In those otherwise unimportant places, God visited his people – unimportant people, poor people, widows with no source of support, sons whose lives were being cut short way ahead of time (as happens violently to so many in our own society today). God didn’t just visit. He connected with them in a personal way. Elijah and Jesus did so directly by touching the dead bodies, which, of course, risked ritual impurity from contact with a corpse. Elijah and Jesus didn’t just speak God’s word, they acted it out, by touching the dead, and thus bonding with all grieving and suffering people there and everywhere.

Both Elijah (in anticipation) and Jesus (in fulfillment) were revealing the kingdom of God – not just talking about it as an abstract idea, but making it happen in people’s messed up lives by bonding with them.  And, like the widow’s son, our own response to the surge of new life within us must be to get up and speak. Like the grieving widows and the people in the crowd, we too must recognize God’s word at work in our world, God visiting his people.

And not just visiting, but staying with us! Our human lives are created by the power of God, but they are maintained and sustained by his incredible compassion in not just visiting but being with us in Jesus – and in his Church. As beneficiaries of Christ’s compassionate presence in our lives, we are called upon to be its witnesses - to continue to express it and share it in our ordinary (and hence not so ordinary) lives together, embodying God’s new kingdom with one another in our world.

Homily for the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 5, 2016

The Fractured Republic

Yuval Levin is an Israeli-born American political analyst and former member of the Bush White House domestic policy staff, whom New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait once called "the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era." Three years ago, Levin published The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, a study of the historical and philosophical roots of our modern Left-Right political divide, the kind of illumination of present political debates by engaging the great tradition of political philosophy that I was once schooled in and taught to try to emulate. Interestingly, Levin was born in 1977, the same year I finished my academic graduate study in political philosophy. That makes him not only almost 30 years younger than me but a member of the subsequent generation and thus able to look back at my mid-century era with both familiarity and distance. This he does very well in his latest work, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of individualism.

Levin is unabashedly an intellectual of the Right. He is, to my mind, much too fond of "federalism" and much too distrustful of what Progressive politics has accomplished in the last century and, with certain caveats, I believe can yet accomplish. He seems to share the conservative disdain, for example, for Medicare, which continues to be an electoral albatross for the political Right. (Witness, therefore, the rise of Donald Trump and the decline of Paul Ryan). That said, Levin makes a powerful case for the need to reinvigorate the middle layers of society, the network of mediating structures and institutions of families and communities where we live most of our lives and which must flourish if we are really to thrive. This is not a new argument. It has its roots in Alexis de Tocqueville's masterful analysis of the Ancien Regime (The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 1856). Peter Berger addressed it in 1974  in Pyramids of Sacrifice, a book I once assigned in one of my courses when I was teaching. It has been a staple preoccupation of communitarian-oriented thinkers in this era of extreme social fragmentation in which increasingly isolated individuals find themselves bereft of traditional communal connections and are connected only to the centralized, administrative state.

None of that is particularly new. Nor is it new to notice that both sides - Right and Left - have equally contributed to this. The Right's economic libertarianism and the Left's moral libertarianism have - over roughly the same period - collaborated in undoing many of the social supports people need to depend upon, notably the family. What stands out in Levin's analysis is his historic perspective.

His premise is that both Right and Left look back nostalgically to the post-war era as a kind of Golden Age. And that nostalgia, he believes, blocks both sides from engaging effectively with the new society that has developed in the interim. 

He rightly recognizes the post-war era as one of successful consolidation. It rested on "an extraordinarily stable and cohesive social foundation" and "exceptionally limited diversity in every area of American life." It was in important respects "a corporatist,, cartel-based" economy" that sustained and was sustained by cultural conformity. Of course, as we all know, a sustained process of cultural liberalization began during that period. But, for a time, it all continued to work so well, because "the culture being liberalized was highly consolidated and constrained."

Back then, "the Left was fighting the cultural constriction while reveling in the economic consensus; the Right was fighting the economic constrictions while reveling in the cultural consensus. Both sides today therefore recall that time as offering a stable foundation for a satisfying struggle for necessary liberalization, even if each side has a different idea of what the foundation was and what needed to be liberalized."

Since then, consolidation has given way to de-consolidation - both economically and culturally. Ours is a diffused and fragmented society in both arenas and is becoming more so all the time. Levin analyzes both processes of diffusion - the fragmenting of a once concentrated economy (a development he seems to see on balance as more positive than negative) and the breakdown of traditional religious and cultural structures, most notably the family (a process he recognizes as much more problematic).

So today we have a situation in which "the Right wants unmitigated economic individualism but a return to common more norms. The Left wants unrestrained moral individualism but economic consolidation. Both will need to come to terms with some uncomfortable realities of twenty-first century America."

The resulting challenge for liberals is to recognize "that cultural liberation has real costs, especially fro the most vulnerable. And it means they must look at our mediating institutions not as threats or as relics of prejudice and backwardness, but as partners and as constructive means of change." Conservatives, on the other hand, have to come to terms with a much more diverse and culturally fractured society and "should think about preserving the preconditions for moral living in terms of building cohesive, attractive, moral subcultures in those mediating layers of society." That requires that conservatives shift from a vocabulary of "radical individualism" to one of "middling communitariansm." As a conservative, Levin inevitably values markets. But he also values "families, communities, charities, religious congregations, fraternal groups, unions, and countless other institutions."

Unsurprisingly, there remains some distance between Levin's economic prescriptions and what I would favor. I remain much more convinced of the necessity of a strong modern national community than he seems to be. He dismisses President obama's statement in his Second Inaugural Address - Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people - as an "emaciated understanding" that leaves no room for "meaningful middle layers of society" between the individual and the nation. I admit that there is such a dangerous dynamic in contemporary progressivism - notably in the increasing hostility to religion. The challenge, I believe, is to strengthen both the bonds of our national community and the mediating structures of family, religion, etc,, within which we live most of our day-to-day loves. An unbalanced conservative emphasis on society at the expense of the state, may be less harmful than the unbalanced conservative emphasis on the individual at the expense of both society and the state which has largely reigned up until now. But it is still unbalanced and still fails to appreciate the singularly necessary role of the sovereign national community in the modern world.

I resonated more with Levin's recommendations to religious institutions and communities - to which I shall shortly return in a separate post.