Specular Economics

Last updated on: October 30, 2018 at 12:03 pm By Peter Leithart

In various places, Jean-Pierre Dupuy cites Adam Smith’s claim that “speculation” is the essence of economic activity. Dupuy traces economic “speculation” to its etymological source in the Latin speculum, a mirror.

In The Mark of the Sacred, he writes: “In a key passage of his greatest work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith asks what wealth consists in. It is not what assures our material well-being, since a frugal life would provide for this satisfactorily enough. It is everything that is desired by what Smith calls the spectator, the person who observes us and whose regard we seek to attract. Because both the financial and the real economy rest on a specular logic, the supposed ethical opposition between them cannot be taken seriously. If one condemns the first—something one is hardly obliged to do!—there is no reason not to condemn the second. Considering the economy as a whole, Smith himself speaks of ‘the corruption of our moral sentiments.’”

He relates the same argument in Economy and the Future, citing Rousseau’s distinction of two forms of self-love: “Smith regards interests as having been contaminated by destructive passions. . . . To use Rousseau’s terms, one loves oneself through amour propre, not through amour de soi. This means that improvement of our economic circumstances—bettering our condition, in Smith’s phrase—depends on being able to attract the ‘sympathy’ of others: if we desire wealth, it is not for the illusory material satisfactions that it may give; it is because wealth brings us the admiration of others, an admiration fatally tinged by envy. Inevitably, then, the price of public prosperity is the corruption of our moral sentiments” (12).

He concludes, “The moment desire makes its appearance, as Adam Smith well understood, all the bad passions—envy, jealousy, resentment—immediately and inescapably come into play. To suppose otherwise is to ignore what happens in the real world.”

Girardian Underground

Last updated on: October 27, 2018 at 2:24 pm By Peter Leithart

In various works, Rene Girard analyzes the “underground” of Dostoevsky, most elaborately presented in Notes from Underground. The underground is both a psychology and a metaphysics.

The psychology arises from the dynamics of mimesis and rivalry that are Girard’s key themes, which lead to alienation of frustrated resentment, ressentiment. This is linked to underground metaphysics, which involves the idolatry of the model or mediator, the one from whom we derive our desires.

Thus the underground man in Dostoevsky’s novel models himself after the Russian officer who ignores and humiliates him, and wants to be invited to a reunion with his former schoolmates. On the one hand, he wants to become the officer, who is his rival and model, and wants to be invited to the party. At the same time, he despises both the officer and his schoolmates, because others are always objects in the way of the fulfillment of his desires. The underground man considers himself a victim of their success, even as he attempts to model myself after their success.

Insofar as the desires of the model become his own, insofar as he model himself after his mediator and yet fails to match his model, he is full of self-hatred mixed with admiration for the other. If he can become like his model, then his masochism inverts into sadism, and he abuses those who are weaker, even as his model has abused him.

Thus, sadism and masochism are the twin results of the underground condition. The double mind of modernity – absolute autonomy, absolute determinism – intensifies the dilemma, leading to irrational expressions of freedom, and to sadism and masochism as twin expressions of resentment at his isolation and victimization.

In his Resurrection from Underground, Girard writes: “The masochist always ends up encountering a sadist and the sadist a masochist. Each confirms for the other and for himself the double illusion of grandeur and baseness; each supports and precipitates in the other one the coming and going between exaltation and despair. Hateful imitation is further extended and sterile conflicts provoke others. Everyone cries out, with the underground character, ‘I’m all by myself and they are everyone.’”

He develops the point at greater length in his early book, Desire, Deceit, and the Novel. Why, he asks, “is subjectivity so charged with self-hatred?” The underground man himself explains that he hates himself for not living up to the high standards he sets: r”a cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.”

But this just raises the question of where these demands come from. Girard argues that “They cannot originate in the self,” because a standard from within the self should be within the self’s capacities. Instead, “The subject must have placed his faith in a false promise from the outside. . . . Everyone thinks that he alone is condemned to hell, and that is what makes it hell. The more general the illusion the more glaring it becomes. The farcical side of underground life is revealed in this exclamation of Dostoyevsky’s ‘anti-hero’: ‘I am alone, and they are together’” (56-7).

This is the source of underground masochism. Initially, the subject “believes he is infinitely far from the supreme Good he is pursuing; he cannot believe that the influence of that Good can reach as far as himself. He is thus not sure he can distinguish the mediator from ordinary men.” He is only confident of his self-evaluation, and he evaluates his value as “nil.”

Having judges himself as nothing, he judges others by their ability to discern his nothingness: “he will reject those who feel tenderness and affection for him, whereas he turns eagerly to those who show, by their contempt for him, real or apparent, that they do not belong, like him, to the race of the accursed. We are masochists when we no longer choose our mediator because of the admiration which he inspires in us but because of the disgust we seem to inspire in him” (178).

But, as noted above, this masochistic self-hatred inverts into sadism. In Dostoevsky’s novel, “The underground man strives in a grotesque fashion to copy the impudent boasting of the [Russian officer] who insulted him. . . . After the banquet [with his schoolmates] at which he has degraded and humiliated himself, where he thought he was tormented by petty persecutors, the underground man actually tortures the unfortunate prostitute who falls into his hands. He imitates what he thinks was the conduct of [his classmates] toward himself; he aspires to the divinity with which in his anguish he has clothed his petty fellow actors in the previous scenes” (68).

More generally, Girard remarks that “Sadism is the ‘dialectical’ reverse of masochism. Tired of playing the part of the martyr, the desiring subject chooses to become the tormentor. The triangular conception of desire reveals the relationship of the two attitudes and their frequent alternation. . . . The sadist wants to persuade himself that he has already attained his goal; he tries to take the place of the mediator and see the world through his eyes, in the hope that the play will gradually turn into reality.”

Underlying this, Girard discerns a religious aspiration: “The sadist’s violence is yet another effort to attain divinity. . . . The sadist cannot achieve the illusion of being the mediator without transforming his victim into a replica of himself. At the very moment of redoubling his brutality he cannot help recognizing himself in the other who is suffering. This is the meaning of that strange “communion” between the victim and his tormentor so often observed” (184-5).

According to Girard, this underground psychology is a kind of inversion for Christianity. It resembles Christianity in its imitation of a model, in its stress on self-sacrifice, in its demand for atonement; but it is idolatrous, since the model to be imitated is not God but another human being, and this distorts Christian atonement and sacrifice into masochism and sadism.

Inner Rings and Tribal Politics

Last updated on: October 27, 2018 at 10:54 am By Peter Leithart

Alan Jacobs has recently (How To Think) used CS Lewis’s essay on the “Inner Ring” to explain what has happened to political discourse in the US.

Lewis began his essay by citing a passage from Tolstoy, which revealed an informal hierarchy, an “inner ring,” within the overt organizational structures of the Russian army. He provided a sketch of the phenomenon from Tolstoy’s description:

“The [informal hierarchy] is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.”

Membership in the inner ring is signaled in various ways: “There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks.”

But the ring is fluid, its boundaries constantly shifting: “It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six weeks’ absence, you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered. There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside.”

Lewis believed that the desire to enter an inner ring was one of the most important passions in social life: “in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that ‘Society,’ in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.”

And Lewis believed that the desire to enter an inner ring was the things that would be most likely to tempt a good man to do very bad things: “Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

Jacobs suggests that Lewis’s analysis explains a good deal of conduct in public debate and discourse, particularly on social media. We participate in public debate not only to arrive at the truth but to signal our belonging to this or that inner ring. We adopt certain keywords (with or without hashtags) that show we belong to some enlightened tribe.

To prove our membership, we have to demonstrate hatred for the “repulsive cognitive other” and sometimes have to stake out extreme positions in order to prove our bona fides to others within the group. If we want to be in a leftwing inner ring, we have to express extreme hatred of Trump; if we aspire to enter a rightwing tribe, we have to hate everything and everyone that comes from the Republican party.

Our politics is shaped by competing, mutually excluive inner rings.

Among Beasts

Last updated on: October 20, 2018 at 5:58 pm By Peter Leithart

With Saudi Arabia in the news following the murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi, there’s an opening for rethinking the US relation with Saudi. The following is an excerpt from my 2012 Between Babel and Beast. Numbers and details may be somewhat outdated, but the main points stand.

In August 2011, the Pew Research Center released a report on global restrictions on religion. The Pew analysis divided restrictions on religious liberty into two categories. The analysis analyzes governmental efforts to control religious groups, prevent conversion, limit preaching and proselytizing, as well as laws prohibiting blasphemy, apostasy, and defamation of religion (Government Restriction Index, GRI).

The Pew survey also estimates unofficial social hostility promoted by individuals, private organizations and groups (Social Hostility Index, SHI), which measures mob violence, religiously-motivated crimes, physical conflict about conversions, harassment for wearing distinctive religious clothing, terrorist acts, and war. Both measures are based on a survey of various types of religious restrictions, and are summed up on a 1-10 scale.

Overall, 21% of the surveyed countries had a “High” (4.7-7.1) or “Very High” (7.2-8.3) rating in government restrictions on religion, but given the high populations of many of these countries, about 59% of the world’s population lives under Highly or Very Highly restriction conditions regarding religious freedom. 22% of the world’s nations have “High” or “Very High” ratings in the SHI, and that includes 48% of the world’s population.

One of remarkable things about this list is the number of U.S. “allies” that appear on the Pew Forum’s list of nations that place “Very High” and “High” restrictions on religion. In the “Very High” category are Egypt, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. The “Highly” restrictive nations include U.S. aid recipients Pakistan, Russia, India, Turkey, Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan, and America’s #1 aid recipient, Israel.

Though the Pew Forum study found that Muslims are persecuted in 117 countries, most of the nations that receive U.S. military aid are not restricting the religious freedom of Muslims. Many suppress Jews, and nearly all of them restrict the freedom of Christians of one variety or another, sometimes of every variety.

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia receives little direct military aid from the U.S., but it receives aid in many other forms. Since 1951, the U.S. has had a Military Training Mission in Saudi Arabia that provides training and other security services to the Saudi army. Military installations have been built with the aid of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 2007 Saudi Arabia received a military package worth $13 billion, part of a $60 billion package to middle eastern countries. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. explained that the Saudis were getting aid because they “are not doing all they can to help us in Iraq.” It is, in short, a very expensive bribe.

It is a bribe to keep the oil flowing, a bribe to the Bush family’s “good friends” the Royal House of Saud (see Ungar, House of Bush, House of Saud). It is a large bribe to a Wahhabist regime that officially prohibits the practice of Christianity. There are somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Catholics in Saudi Arabia, mostly Filipino and other Asian immigrants who take menial jobs that Saudis disdain (see Tom Farr, World of Faith and Freedom).[3]

Orthodox believers and Protestants are also residents. It is illegal for Christians to have Bibles and crucifixes, to build churches, wear religious symbols, or even hang Christian images in private homes, and Christians are arrested and beaten for violations. During 2010-2011, a number of incidents have occurred, all documented at persecution.org:

*In October 2010, twelve Filipino migrant workers were arrested at a Mass and charged with proselytizing.

*In March, two Indian Christians were beaten, arrested and sentenced to 45-day prison terms for attending a private prayer meeting. They were finally released after six months.

*In July, a Christian refugee from Eritrea, Eyob Mussie, was expelled from Saudi Arabia after being arrested for proselytizing. Initially, he was facing a death penalty. He may well be killed when he returns to Eritrea.

These isolated incidents are part of a larger pattern of suppression and intimidation. Saudi Arabia’s laws permit private worship by non-Muslims, but ban public worship, supposedly in conformity with the Prophet’s dying wishes. In practice, services “must remain small and inconspicuous. They must not occur regularly at a particular location, lest a church or other non-Muslim place of worship de facto be established.” “Religious police” or Mutawwa’in infiltrated church groups, all of whose services are “vulnerable to raids.” Few priests are allowed into the kingdom (Farr, 237).

The U.S. State Department is well aware of Saudi abuses. The Department’s own 2011 report on religious freedom in Saudi Arabia stated: “The laws and policies restrict religious freedom, and in practice, the government generally enforced these restrictions. Freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law and is severely restricted in practice. The country is an Islamic state governed by a monarchy; the king is head of both state and government. According to the basic law, Sunni Islam is the official religion and the country’s constitution is the Qur’an and the Sunna (traditions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). . . . The public practice of any religion other than Islam is prohibited, and there is no separation between state and religion. The government did not respect religious freedom in law, but generally permitted Shia religious gatherings and non-Muslim private religious practices. Some Muslims who did not adhere to the government’s interpretation of Islam faced significant political, economic, legal, social, and religious discrimination, including limited employment and educational opportunities, underrepresentation in official institutions, restrictions on religious practice, and restrictions on places of worship and community centers.”

Yet Saudi Arabia is still regarded as an “indispensable ally.” The U.S. rarely intervenes in defense of religious minorities, lest we lose what we view as a crucial friendly power in a critical region of the world. When Thomas Farr proposed to Saudi officials that they purchase buildings to rent to non-Muslim religious groups, condemn or criminalize the activities of the Mutawwa’in, and permit more priests to enter the country, U.S. officials showed “distinct discomfort” and the Saudi officials found themselves “called away to some other emergency” (Farr, 240).

Clearly, promotion of Christianity, or of religious freedom, does not determine our Saudi policy. Unsurprisingly, intertwined economic and strategic goals are paramount. We have great power, and we act like one. Worse, we pay deference to monsters. Saudi Arabia is a beast, but on whose back does Saudi Arabia ride?

Through the Microscope

Last updated on: October 16, 2018 at 12:21 am By Peter Leithart

Gotta love Mary Midgley. She died on October 10 of this year, a month after her 99th birthday. To the end, she did philosophy with a rare degree of common sense and wit.

She begins The Myths We Live By, published when she was a mere octogenarian, by explaining how myths function in science, and provides a light takedown of the obsession with machine imagery:

“machine imagery, which began to pervade our thought in the seventeenth century, is still potent today. We still often tend to see ourselves, and the living things around us, as pieces of clockwork: items of a kind that we ourselves could make, and might decide to remake if it suits us better. Hence the confident language of ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘the building-blocks of life.’ Again, the reductive, atomistic picture of explanation, which suggests that the right way to understand complex wholes is always to break them down into their smallest parts, leads us to think that truth is always revealed at the end of that other seventeenth-century invention, the microscope.”

The dominance of the microscope carries an ontological import: “Where microscopes dominate our imagination, we feel that the large wholes we deal with in everyday experience are mere appearances. Only the particles revealed at the bottom of the microscope are real. Thus, to an extent unknown in earlier times, our dominant technology shapes our symbolism and thereby our metaphysics, our view about what is real. The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone – steel and glass, plastic and rubber and silicon – of his own devising and sees them as the final truth” (1).

She later cites E.O. Wilson as a species of microscopic thinker, with his aspiration “to find minutissima, ultimate units of thought, and to connect them eventually with particular minimal brain-states so as to provide (as he says) a kind of alphabet of a brain-language underlying all thought. This is an almost inconceivably ambitious project, a wild kind of cosmic expansion of Leibniz’s quest for a universal language” (64).

And she finds a similar myth lying behind Richard Dawkins’s claim that “There is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory. If this were not so, then almost any statement about two people agreeing with each other would be meaningless. An ‘idea-meme’ might be defined as an entity which is capable of being transmitted from one brain to another. . . . The differences in the way that people represent the theory are then, by definition, not part of the meme” (64-5).

But this isn’t how the actual history of thought works. There aren’t any discrete, unchanging mini-essences, detectable by a philosophical microscope: “Questions about just where the centre of a particular doctrine lies are exactly the ones that constantly divide people who are interested in that doctrine. These people often express strong views on the matter, but in doing so they are taking a moral stand, not detecting a solid cultural atom” (65).

Daniel Dennett provides a list of “complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units,” units like “the Odyssey” or “deconstruction” or “wearing clothes.” But this effort to reduce to basic fixed essences is laughable: “the literary conventions that define items like the Odyssey are artefacts devised for civic convenience, not fixed natural units. Wearing clothes is not any sort of minimum unit but a general term used to cover a vast range of customs. Deconstructionism is a loose name covering a group of ideas that stand in some sort of historical relation, a group that certainly has no fixed core. . . . the Odyssey contains many elements that are memorable on their own, such as the stories of the Cyclops, of Scylla and Charybdis, and of the Wandering Rocks. It can hardly be a minimal unit” (65).

Gotta love Mary Midgley. RIP.

The Resistance

Last updated on: October 14, 2018 at 7:27 pm By Peter Leithart

Martyrdom is the true resistance to the powers and principalities that rule in heavenly places.

Witnesses broke the old creation order. Martyrs shattered the Roman world, so that God’s throne was set up in Europe and began shaking things.

Early Christians were witnesses against the religious foundations of Rome. Rome existed because of a “social contract” between gods and Romans; as long as the Romans honored their gods, the gods would give Rome success.

Christians broke the social contract by their silence, by their refusal to worship Caesar, by their insistence that Jesus is Lord.

As Steven D. Smith has pointed out (Pagans & Christians in the City), we have now reached a point in the U.S. where Christian transcendence challenges the underpinnings of social order.

He describes a shift in the basis for religious freedom claims. Older forms of religious freedom required the courts to recognize the possibility of a higher calling, a higher law and authority to which the court too is accountable.

This is now seen as “an impermissible relinquishment of the community’s complete sovereignty.” Conscience is the higher power, the sacred, that must be protected.

Christian talk is seen as discriminatory and bigoted, intolerable in public. And, as Smith says, the space of the public is increasing.

Religion has been squeezed from public into a relatively free space outside the walls. But this space is shrinking “as the public sphere has expanded, leaving less room for the private.” Antidiscrimination laws apply to institutions and businesses: “Antidiscrimination laws have the effect of annexing the marketplace, once mostly thought of as a private sphere, into the public domain, at least for many important purposes.” We’re still free to practice religion in private, “but the ‘private’ no longer includes the domain of business, or economic activity.”

Reasonable opinions are permissible in public, but religious opinions are by definition irrational. Thus Robin West demands that we “accept the ‘shared’ public norms as a condition of participating in the public sphere, including the economic marketplace.”

As in Rome, Christians are deviants; we don’t accept the rules of the game. When we say Jesus is Lord, we’re saying that the people are not. that God imposes limits on human freedom.

We don’t need to seek martyrdom. Living a faithful Christian life will put us at odds with the rules of the game. If we teach our children that the Bible is true, we’ll be considered by some to be child-abusers. If we say that abortion is murder or that sodomy is an abomination (which is what the Bible says), we’re bigots. If we try to live Christianly in public – including the workplace – we may well face the wrath of the gods.

Every time we bear witness, every time we say “we must obey God rather than man,” we are challenging the very foundations of contemporary political order. We are messing with the gods of conscience and consent as surely as the early Christians messed with the Roman gods.

Every time we resist by faithful witness, we prove the impotence of the gods who oppose us.

Every time we bear witness, we put another crack in the firmament, and the throne of God, flashing with lightening and rumbling with thunder, descends to earth to shake Babylon to the ground.

The Unreason of Reason

Last updated on: October 13, 2018 at 6:22 pm By Peter Leithart

There were, of course, varieties of Enlightenment, some more favorable to tradition than others, but what Jonathan Israel has called the “Radical Enlightenment” won, and they were the most hostile to traditional social and political forms.

The Radical Enlightenment was committed to absolute freedom – from the past, from limits, from anything that stood in the way of critical reason. As Adam Ferguson, a moderate rationalist, saw it, the radical enlighteners were like “an ambitious architect who aspires to tear down the entire existing edifice of institutions and then rebuild it from scratch on purely rational principles.”

The Radical Enlightenment was determined to receive nothing except what has passed through the purging fires of criticism. The gifts of the past are not received because we honor the giver, or because we believe these gifts are ultimately from a Divine Giver, but only because we have found the gifts measure up to our standards. Between the gift and the reception there is a moment of evaluation – is this a gift we want to receive?

Radical Enlightenment is, we might say, founded on a massive act of ingratitude.

But that ingratitude is incoherent. “Denken isst danken,” Heidegger says somewhere: “To think is to thank.” We cannot even begin to think without making use of categories that we did not invent. We cannot discover, teach or be taught, without making use of a language that pre-dates our existence by some thousands of years.

The freedom to think, discover, reform and renew, all of it depends on gratitude, a reception prior to any critical scrutiny, a reception upon which critical scrutiny itself depends. When reason becomes an absolute, it dissolves into unreason; when criticism is given priority to reception, it destroys the foundation on which it rests.

As Hegel realized, the Radical Enlightenment aspiration to absolute liberty turned on itself. Irrational tyranny turned wolfish and ate up its original hopes.

Not only were the Radicals bound to fail to deliver on their promise of liberation, but absolute liberty had, Hegel thought, an internal drive toward its opposite. Theoretically, the ideology of absolute freedom fails because its conception of liberty is purely negative. Absolute freedom is freedom from constraints of any and every kind, the refusal to accept any authority that has not been chosen. By that definition, my family, my ancestry, my nationality, my early education, even my own body count as unchosen constraints that need to be overcome if I am going to be truly free.

The psychological toll is massive. I am who I am because I am related to others, but according to the notion of absolute liberty, those others are chains that limit my freedom. When I unleash my corrosive rationality against those constraints, I am breaking the ties that define my specific identity. Absolute freedom is a bid to be as God, but in the end it leaves me even less than myself.

Absolute freedom is far from a purely abstract theory, and as a practical political agenda it is also destined to collapse into tyranny. Guided by the principle of absolute freedom, French Revolutionaries turned on the structures of the ancien regime, and when those structures had been reduced to rubble they had to free themselves from themselves by turning the same destructive power on the revolution itself.

Celebrating his survival of an assassination attempt during the preparations for the Feast of the Supreme Being, Robespierre gave an impassioned speech in which he swore “by the daggers already reddened with the blood of martyrs” that he would “exterminate every single one of the criminals who want to rob us of happiness and liberty.” A few days later, he wrote a set of laws designed to protect the Republic’s freedoms against her enemies. Over the next month, over 1300 people were guillotined for offenses against the state like sawing down a tree of liberty, producing sour wine, or shouting “A fig for the nation.”

Hegel discerned the inner continuity between the witty salon talk of Voltaire and Diderot, and the bloody regime of Robespierre. Enlightened liberty was not betrayed by the Terror; Terror was its fulfillment.

Terry Eagleton summarizes Hegel’s argument this way: “Since limits make us what we are, the idea of absolute freedom is bound to be terroristic. There is certainly the case for Hegel, who finds such absolute freedom epitomized in the French Revolution and names it ‘the freedom of the void.’ Such liberty has a taste of death about it – but a death which is struck empty of meaning, ‘the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive, nothing that fills it with a content.’ This purely negative brand of liberty, so he considers, is a ‘fury of destruction,’ which can break with the ancien regime but proves incapable of building another in its place. This is a logical incapacity, not an empirical one, since whatever such freedom might fashion would inevitably constitute a constraint on it. It can feel alive, Hegel observes, only in the act of destruction . . . Aspiration is thus strangely close to a kind of nihilism.”

Divine Liturgist

Last updated on: October 13, 2018 at 4:20 pm By Peter Leithart

God speaks and light appears. He separates light and darkness, assigns names to each, and judges the whole to be good. Next day, He’s at it again, speaking, separating, assessing, judging. And so it goes throughout the days of creation: With an insistent, incantatory rhythm, God speaks, sees, names, judges. Poetic yes, but more fundamentally, creation unfolds as the enacted poetry of liturgy.

From the first pages of Scripture, before we know much of anything about God, we know He’s a God of repetitive ritual actions and formalized speech. We already know He’s the divine liturgist.

Beginning with Day 3, something else begins to happen. On Day 1, God speaks to nothing, because there is nothing other than God. His speech makes the auditor. Once the seas and land have appeared, though, He addresses them. “Let the earth sprout vegetation” and “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures.” And when he calls on earth to sprout, fruit trees and grain plants spring up from the land. He calls on the waters to teem with living souls, and living souls swarm the seas.

God the divine liturgist forms creation as a liturgical partner, a respondent who can speak and act in ecstatic obedience to His creative word.

So the heavens tell the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours speech, and night to night pours out knowledge (Psalm 19). He calls the sun from its tent, and it comes racing across the sky like a mighty man. He speaks thunder, and cedars break, the mountains of Lebanon skip, the wilderness shakes, does calve (Psalm 29). All creation joins in the dialogue, the duet (Psalms 148-150). God speaks, and every creature responds not just with but as a form of praise.

Human beings are made in the image of this God, the God of repetitive, creative speech, the God who creates by ritual and liturgy. Made in His image, we are, whether we want to be or not, liturgical creatures.

We are more homo adorans than homo sapiens. Our most basic orientation comes not from what we think or feel, but from what or whom we worship. Our lives are driven by desires, our desires oriented in turn to an object of ultimate worship. We are created priests to lead a cosmic liturgy, to bring the whole world into the worship of God. Every creature has its own mode of praise, but creation’s praise is fulfilled in us.

No one expressed this more insistently than the eccentric English poet, Christopher Smart.

Continue reading here.

Rawls, Envy, Sacrifice

Last updated on: October 11, 2018 at 3:10 am By Peter Leithart

John Rawls begins his Theory of Justice with what he describes as a “standard” social-scientific concept of rationality: “a rational person is thought to have a coherent set of preferences between the options open to him. He ranks these options according to how well they further his purposes; he follows the plan which will satisfy more of his desires rather than less, and which has the greater chance of being successfully executed” (25).

But there is one deviation from the standard conception, an explicit exclusion of envy: “The special assumption I make is that a rational individual does not suffer from envy. He is not ready to accept a loss for himself if only others have less as well. He is not downcast by the knowledge or perception that others have a larger index of primary social goods. Or at least this is true as long as the differences between himself and others do not exceed certain limits, and he does not believe that the existing inequalities are founded on injustice or are the result of letting chance work itself out for no compensating social purpose” (25).

Behind the veil of ignorance, everyone seeks to advance his ends without a sidelong glance at anyone else: “the persons in the original position try to acknowledge principles which advance their system of ends as far as possible. They do this by attempting to win for themselves the highest index of primary social goods, since this enables them to promote their conception of the good most effectively whatever it turns out to be. The parties do not seek to confer benefits or to impose injuries on one another; they are not moved by affection or rancor. Nor do they try to gain relative to each other; they are not envious or vain. Put in terms of a game, we might say: they strive for as high an absolute score as possible” (144).

Rawls brings envy and other disruptive passions back into play later in the argument, but he insists that “when the principles adopted are put into practice, they lead to social arrangements in which envy and other destructive feelings are not likely to be strong. The conception of justice eliminates the conditions that give rise to disruptive attitudes. It is, therefore, inherently stable” (144).

After initially ignoring the problem of envy and ascertained principles of justice on the basis of envy-less rationality, “we check to see whether just institutions so defined are likely to arouse and encourage these propensities to such an extent that the social system becomes unworkable and incompatible with human good. If so, the adoption of the conception of justice must be reconsidered. But should the inclinations engendered support just arrangements, or be easily accommodated by them, the first part of the argument is confirmed” (531).

Here, I’m less interested in Rawls’s argument in support of this conclusion than in the original exclusion. In various writings on Rawls, Jean-Pierre Dupuy has called attention to the “self-deconstruction of liberal order.”

His argument goes like this: Rawls entire theory is founded on rejection of utilitarianism, the notion that one member of a society may be sacrificed to enhance the advantages of the many. Every person must be treated as an end. Rawls thus grounds his theory on the twin foundations of rationality and rejection of the justice of sacrifice.

The problem is that you don’t need to be a utilitarian to accept sacrificial logic. In sacrificial situations (Sophie’s Choice; the trolley problem), a sacrificial choice is perfectly compatible with Rawls’s principle of unanimity. As Dupuy puts it, “In the case of Sophie’s Choice, with the sacrificial solution one child dies and the other lives; if the sacrifice is refused, both of them die. Now, the principle of unanimity is a minimal principle of rationality. Its self-evidence is difficult to deny, as is made manifest by the declaration of Caiaphas to the high priests and Pharisees, as recorded in the Gospel of John: ‘You understand nothing. You do not see that it is better that a single man die for the people and that the nation as a whole does not perish.'”

If Rawls’s own principles “justify the sacrificial solution in a sacrificial situation,” how does it differ from utilitarianism? Dupuy claims that Rawls’s acknowledges that :his theory does not apply to sacrificial situations. It is an ‘ideal’ theory that is only valid for a society already governed by the rawlsian principles of justice!”

The circularity is dizzying: “Utilitarianism is accused of favoring sacrifice in cases which rawlsian theory excludes from its own field of application; were it applied there, its principles would also justify sacrifice. And all this on the pretext that utilitarianism, unlike Rawls’s theory, claims to be universally applicable!”

For Dupuy, the fact that Rawls’s theory contains its own refutation (=self-deconstruction) is one of the merits of his work. It reveals “that the ethos of ‘democratic’ societies rests on an exclusion: the exclusion of those sacrificial situations precisely which the Theory excludes from its field of application. To put this another way: what the Theory excludes from its field of application is in fact constitutive of the Theory and is an integral part of it. The Theory tells us at least as much by what it rejects as by what it affirms.” Overtly, antisacrificial logic is superior to sacrificial; but in the excluded situations, the opposite obtains. And the excluded isn’t some side issue, but is constitutive of the domain of the theory.

This is relevant, Dupuy argues, to the exclusion of envy from the formulation of principles of justice. Sacrifice may, after all, be a result not of rational calculation but of envy. Rawls’s theory “asserts that it has nothing to do with the unleashing of envy and with sacrifice, but it is haunted by them. The liberal order discloses that it contains disorder, in both senses of the word ‘contain’—it has it within itself, and it holds it back. The tangled hierarchy between order and disorder is built into the liberal order.”

Hate Crime, Brexit, and the Diversity System

Last updated on: October 10, 2018 at 9:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Ben Cobley’s The Tribe is a detailed, sobering examination of the left-liberal system of identity politics. Cobley, a leftwing journalist, describes a diversity “system.” The system is founded on a division of the population between favored and unfavored groups, identified by race, sex and sexual orientation, age, religion, class, wealth, etc. Well-placed managers and brokers (often white and male) act as adminstrators on behalf of favored groups, and use their clout to bludgeon members of unfavored groups when they say or do anything that violates the system’s purity rules and taboos.

One of his extended examples of the system at work is the supposed increase in the incidence of hate crimes following the Brexit referendum. The number of reported incidents increased, but since no evidence is required beyond the perception of the victim it’s impossible to say if expressions of hate actually increased.

Besides, Remain politicians called for more reporting of incidents, and even suggested that an increase in reported hate crimes would be a sign of success. Cobley writes, politicians explicitly stated “that an increase in hate crime reporting is a sign that ‘we’ are having a positive impact—in this case because it is helping reveal a truer picture about how widespread this sort of incident is. This ability of politicians to influence crime statistics, simply by raising awareness and encouraging people to report incidents, is worth reflecting on.”

One of the effects of the system is to criminalize policy differences: “After the referendum, a staunchly anti-Tory, anti-Brexit Oxford physics professor called Joshua Silver reported the Home Secretary Amber Rudd (who had actually been a prominent Remain campaigner) to the police for talking about tightening immigration rules as part of the Brexit process in a draft of a conference speech. . . . Under Rudd’s own department’s guidelines, it had to be recorded as a ‘hate incident,’ even though this would criminalise the views of maybe 60–80 per cent of the population.”

The media instantly took certain incidents as examples of hate crime, regardless of whether there was evidence, and sometimes in the face of contrary evidence. Cobley mentions an incident involving graffiti on a Polish cultural center in Hammersmith, where some painted ‘F*** You OMP” on the door.

Cobley explains what happened next: “The centre promptly reported it to police as a racially-aggravated hate crime while media organisations reported that the message said ‘Go Home,’ cuing a huge wave of sympathy and support mixed with angry denunciations of Brexit, plus Leave voters and campaigners. However, the centre’s management and London’s Metropolitan Police, which was still investigating the incident as a hate crime eight months later, seemingly failed to engage with what the graffiti said. It did not tell Poles to go home; it rather directed its negative sentiments at ‘OMP’, which is an acronym for ‘Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej,’ a Eurosceptic Polish think tank that had issued a statement congratulating Britain for the Brexit vote.”

In other words, this wasn’t an incident of Leave racism. It was an example of Remainer sour grapes, an example of Remainer racism directed against the actual opinions of Polish people.

All this is much to the advantage of the diversity brokers. After Brexit, “they activated the system of diversity: joining the apparently victimised identity group, as a group, to the administration of protection by those who oversee our public life in the media and elsewhere. . . . It has helped activists and community leaders to promote their victimhood, claim that it is getting worse, and demand more resources to address it, reducing budgets for other things. It has enabled those who wanted to remain in the EU to demonise Leave voters and the Vote Leave campaign. . . . It has given the ‘facts’ to anyone, in Britain or abroad, who wants to believe—and wants others to believe—that ‘Brexit Britain’ is a nasty, racist country. It has taken a cudgel to the supposed trustworthiness and independence of official statistics.”

In particular, by making immigrants appears as a victim group “in need of support and protection from those who preside over our public life,” they were able to make “the Leave side appear outside the system, outside the bounds of acceptability, implicated in hate crime and murder. For many of those who were attracted towards this narrative, the question of Remain or Leave became one about whether Britain was an acceptable, civilised country or a place dominated by extremist, far right haters and racist murderers.”