Last week Andrew Sullivan responded to the burning of Notre Dame by describing [secularized] Christianity as one of the “metaphysical foundations” of liberalism:
“It remains an open question whether liberalism, broadly understood, can survive the loss of its metaphysical foundations [its defense of the individual soul as inviolate]. And as we see liberal democracy struggle to articulate its truth against the ocean of nihilism, the lure of tribalism, the cult of the strongman, and the left’s contempt for the Enlightenment and religion — the burning of this symbol of Christian devotion [Notre Dame] cut me to the quick.”
The heart of “our universal civilization”(1) is the Christian value Sullivan cites: The individual soul is inviolate. From this value stems that Eighteenth Century rallying cry, The Rights of Man, which even a criminal “president” cannot abrogate.
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(1) V. S. Naipaul on “Our Universal Civilization”
Excerpt: “A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
First, credit to whom credit is due. In the face of a presidential candidate of the obscenely privileged one percent, and a VP candidate known best for a budget plan to dismantle the humanitarian safety net for the poor, America's minorities, women, and the young rose to the challenge. They marched to the polls in great number to let their choice of a “politics of kindness”* be known.
In the words of Carl Sandburg, “The People, Yes!”
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Henry Fairlie was an English journalist and author who chose to become an American. In Bite The Hand That Feeds You, he argued that the realm of the patriot is the political realm, and that the political realm constitutes the public, not the private, sector. “Is
it really necessary to reject civic consciousness, of which compassion
for one's less fortunate fellow citizens is the ultimate binding
cement,” he asked, “in order to be a conservative or neoconservative?”
The Romans insisted, he noted, “on the
three great civic virtues: dignitas, gravitas, pietas.” … Otherwise “the idea of citizenship** [is] all but submerged in appeals to private pursuits, private satisfactions, the private sector.”
For
those who glorify “the market,” he continued, “the purpose is always
the same, to leave the economic realm in command over all others, to
explain all human impulse, as it is expressed in the political process,
in terms of nothing more than the ‘acquisitive instinct.’ ... they are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of the political realm has been surrendered.”
As
for the Romney candidacy, his gracious concession speech deserves
tribute in the spirit of Shakespeare’s “Nothing in his life became him like
the leaving it.” Nevertheless, I fear that his ascension to the
presidency would have represented the triumph of the “economic view,” of
the valorization of private gain at the expense of the public good, over the political realm. There is the
sense of a narrow escape from a crisis of the republic.
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Best line of the day:
Atlantic
columnist Molly Ball cites “a smart [GOP] party strategist” who wrote, “Bain was a
critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough
voters in Ohio. He
came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing
your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions
and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses
while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” [Emphasis added.]
(*) “Democratic politics is the politics of kindness”: Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat
(**) For
the power of citizenship in Roman justice, note how Paul (born Saul of Tarsus), as recounted
in the King James Bible, responds to a provincial ecclesiastical court in
Acts 25:11 - 12: “For
if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I
refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these
accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal unto Caesar.
Then Festus, when he had conferred with the council, answered, Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? unto Caesar shalt thou go.” [Emphasis added. In Acts 22, Paul is recorded as stating that, in contrast to those who paid a large sum of money to acquire citizenship, he was a Roman by birth.]
