Smells Like Party Spirit

The Agitprop Machine of the Thing That Used to Be Conservatism Swings Into Action.

What interests me here is the raw groupthink of the thing, a groupthink that seems to me to be indistinguishable from the pack journalism that decided to go after Benedict like teenagers setting fire to a helpless stroller in Central Park after midnight. What matters in such situations is not a serious discussion of the merits of an argument or the facts of the case, but simply and solely the question, “Whose side are you on?”

So: with Benedict, when somebody points out that there is virtually nothing to support the crazy charges against him in the Murphy case, the reply is, “Whose side are you on? Some pervert priest or The Children?” Likewise, when you note, as John Allen does, that Ratzinger underwent a learning curve on abuse in the Church (you know, like the rest of us did), you are shouted down by ultramontanes as a Pope basher: “Whose side are you on? Holy Church or the jackals and sharks in the media?” Benedict cannot be a fallible mortal who only slowly grasped the dimensions of the problem and underwent a conversion in the early part of the last decade. He has to have always been flawless in his zealous concern about the matter. And variation from that script means you hate Benedict and want to destroy him.

Similarly, in our political discourse, the Talk Radio Rage Machine seems (like the Left v. Benedict) to be bent on encouraging and exploiting this stupidification of discourse. And the reason it concerns me as a Catholic is that Paul tells us “Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. (Galatians 5:19-21)

Here’s the deal: with party spirit the key is not thinking or critically evaluating ideas. It is repeating the right catchphrases and (just as important) watching with an eagle eye to make sure that those around you are doing likewise. It’s about spotting heretics, not making converts through reasoned discourse. If somebody you thought was “solid” starts to get off message or, heaven forfend, to question the message in any way, the red flags go up and the Group pulls away from the offender or sends the white blood cells out to destroy the foreign object in Tribal Body Politic. The Rage Machine (whether the Democratic Underground or Fox News) has distributed the Talking Points and the duty of the Party Spirit Faithful is to repeat them, not ask “How does the Message from Ideological Headquarters line up with the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church?”

So, for instance, the other day the papers reported:

For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

Result: The Faithful all over the right wing blogosphere (including the Catholic blogosphere) march out to sing the praises of Mutual Assured Destruction, to denounce Obama as the Enemy of the People and to engage in the required 15 Minute Hate while Palin offers her foreign policy analysis via one of the organs of CorrectThink:

“It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable,” said Palin on Wednesday evening while appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. “No administration in America’s history would, I think, ever have considered such a step that we just found out President Obama is supporting today. It’s kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face and I’m not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.’

The task for the Party Spirit faithful is not to say, “Huh?” or “Does that analogy even make sense?” or in any way to remember things like:

2314 “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons – to commit such crimes.

2315 The accumulation of arms strikes many as a paradoxically suitable way of deterring potential adversaries from war. They see it as the most effective means of ensuring peace among nations. This method of deterrence gives rise to strong moral reservations. The arms race does not ensure peace. Far from eliminating the causes of war, it risks aggravating them. Spending enormous sums to produce ever new types of weapons impedes efforts to aid needy populations; it thwarts the development of peoples. Over-armament multiplies reasons for conflict and increases the danger of escalation.

2316 The production and the sale of arms affect the common good of nations and of the international community. Hence public authorities have the right and duty to regulate them. The short-term pursuit of private or collective interests cannot legitimate undertakings that promote violence and conflict among nations and compromise the international juridical order.

One is, rather, expected to praise the Tribal Leader’s homespun “common sense” regardingb the glorious doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. One is not to ask “Is “not using nukes against a non-nuclear state” identical with “not retaliating?” That would be dangerously like thinking and the Party Spirit discourages such Unity Killing activity. If worse comes to worst and a heretic gets out of line with the Spirit of the Party by saying that Obama’s action appears to be a step toward something more in line with actual Church teaching, there are a couple of options for the Party Spirit faithful.

The first is to say, “Whose side are you on? God’s or a Baby-Killing Socialist who wants America’s enemies to attack us with weapons of mass destruction?” For, of course, when you acknowledge any virtue at all in anything that Obama might do or say, you are thereby endorsing absolutely everything he does or says and are clearly an ally of Absolute Evil.

If you point out that the Catechism says what it says, the next line of defense is to play “Simon Peter says”. The way this game works is to urge Catholics to draw a bright thick line between “prudential judgements” and “essential Catholic teaching”. What this means in practice is “anything the Catechism says about stuff the Spirit of the Party doesn’t care about or approves of vs. abortion”.

So: Mutual Assured Destruction is a “prudential judgment” which we can agree to disagree about, but abortion! Are you going to side with a *baby-killer* or with Sarah Palin and her beautiful baby? Yeah, Palin thinks Mutual Assured Destruction is the way to go but we can agree to disagree about that. But if you can’t decide whether you are on the Side of Life with Trig Palin or on the Side of Death with the Baby-Killer Socialist who wants America to be attacked with WMDs, well, maybe you aren’t *really* the pro-lifer you *claim* you are, hmmmmm? Maybe I should start warning people to avoid so-called Catholics like you.”

And so, we return to what the Catechism actually says, which is that Mutual Assured Destruction is evil. Only it doesn’t precisely use that language any more than it spells out each and every form of torture the human mind can devise, so Catholics who oppose torture or the use of nukes are, likewise, part of the Peace and Justice crowd who can be safely ignored and even denounced as ObamaSymps if they ever offer anything less than full-throated denunciation of whatever the Rage Machine commands them to denounce this week.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been disgusted with the unthinking tribalism of the Left in its efforts to whip the Party Spirit of the cultured despisers into a mob action against Benedict. I dislike mobs. They reduce human beings from rational beings to something more like a stampede. Mob members wake up with hangovers, appalled at how they could trade their souls for the approval of the rest of the mob. So I think we Catholics should think long and hard before checking the Catechism at the door and embracing the Talk Radio party spirit that not-so-subtly seduces people to sneer at the Magisterium’s guidance and cheer on doctrines like Mutual Assured Destruction.