Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Easter is the “principal feast of the ecclesial year”. Roman Catholics (and many millions of others, of course) celebrate today the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the hinge event in all of world history.
My best wishes and prayers for the day, and for a happy and fruitful Easter season, to all of our readers.
Presuming the residual antipathies Lex quoted in I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot to be characteristic of UK media figures, we have one more reason to regard tasteless American ahistoricity as a feature rather than a bug, because endocrine-system reactions to “Roman Catholic” are, I believe, just about inconceivable here, and certainly not because we’ve all translated into a higher plane of flawlessly nontheistic rationality.
I was going to make this a comment on Lex’s post but then realized that I wanted to pile on the links, which would choke the comment-spam filter faster than a Greenpeace activist on a tour of a nuclear power plant. So away I go with a barrage of autobiographical details, which is the price of a post written by me that’s anything other than hopelessly abstract. Gosh, you’re thinking, I can’t wait to see this!
And it won’t be. As this writer tells it, “what gets my adrenalin flowing is the words Roman Catholic.”
For us English, hostility sprang from ancient politics. The little history I learned at school taught me of Mary Tudor, the bigot whose five-year reign saw some 300 Protestants put to death; of papal efforts to unthrone the queen of England, her successor Elizabeth I; of Catholic Spain and its Armada; of Catholic Guy Fawkes plotting to blow up Parliament; of James II trying to reinstate his Catholicism in a country that had rejected it. Why all this should matter 300 or 400 years later I did not ask.
All this despite having “no perceptible faith”, yet he still has his “childhood prejudices”.
I don’t think this visceral hostility is sensible, let alone in an unbeliever. No one is trying to ram Catholicism down my throat. Yet, however little it may affect my actions, my prejudice is a fact—after 60-odd years, in a man reasonably educated, still tolerably intelligent, in a largely secular society, in the 21st century.
Some years ago the German ambassador to the UK complained that the British had made World War II the “core of their national identity”. But he was wrong. Anti-Catholicism is the core of British national identity, despite being a post-Christian, non-believing, non-church-going country.
The author concludes:
There are warnings in this for people like me who see human reason and conscience as better guides to modern life than are ancient scriptures, however admirable. First, that we too may be leopards. Second, that if our gut feelings are that durable, we are unwise if we discount the strength of other people’s.
That should be uncontroversial. The Sunnis and Shia, to pick one example, are not going to start liking each other any time soon.
But as to Merry Old England, the problem may have a solution. The recent fumbling around about defining its national identity has been interesting. The Labor Government is unlikely to celebrate the burning of the Pope in effigy as a “core value”. Yet there really is a lot in its history and contemporary culture which has value. By rediscovering its heritage of freedom and individualism and enterprise, they would do themselves a lot of good. I can suggest some books.
The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:
“The biblical sense of history can make Niebhur seem like something other than a liberal. In the ’60’s, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era’s liberal reforms”
It wasn’t Niebuhr’s religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr’s writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman’s bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:
“The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness – ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil…Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics” ( Stockman,24).
I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.
My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.
ADDENDUM:
Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.
Cross-posted at Zenpundit
