Assessing Putin's Russia

I'm pretty sure I've linked to it before, but Perry Anderson's LRB essay from early last year on Russia under Putin remains the best long-form analysis of the subject I've encountered recently - allowing, of course, for Anderson's own Marxist idiosyncracies. Anderson emphasizes Putin's undeniable talents as a practitioner of machtpolitik, both at home and abroad, but he insists on Russia's overall weakness as a world power as well, and both emphases seem worth pondering during this week of Russian aggression, and Western uncertainty about how best to respond.

How Do Religions Spread?

The most interesting post you'll read today - well, at least if you happen to be interested in the spread of Christianity, the impact of state sponsorship and the consequences of a "free market" in religion, and the crucial question of whatever happened to Babylonian paganism? - is right here, courtesy of Razib.
 

Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn and Liberalism

Isaac Chotiner makes some fair points in response to my remarks on Adam Gopnik's essay on G.K. Chesterton, so let me try to clarify my beef with the essay, and by extension with the style of criticism it embodies. My complaint was not that Gopnik brought up Chesterton's anti-Semitism, or that he deplored it. Rather, I objected to the disproportionate weight he placed upon it, which felt more appropriate to an essay on, say, Ezra Pound than to a figure like Chesterton, whose conduct in the shadow of totalitarianism compares relatively favorably to an awful lot of his intellectual contemporaries. And I especially objected to the way that Gopnik used the taint of anti-Semitism to dismiss nearly everything in Chesterton that a contemporary liberal might find challenging or troubling. His essay starts by reassuring the New Yorker's readership - whose familiarity with GKC is presumably extremely limited - that Chesterton "has a loving following among liberal Catholics, like Garry Wills and Wilfrid Sheed, and even nonbelievers, like Martin Gardner" (so it's okay to read him, folks), while simultaneously promising to rescue the Good Chesterton from his reactionary admirers - those "conservative preVatican II types" whose admiration for GKC makes him "a difficult writer to defend." And Gopnik ends, predictably enough, by suggesting that the Good Chesterton, the one New Yorker readers should admire, is the Chesterton who doesn't challenge any of their pieties or prejudices - Chesterton the anti-imperialist, Chesterton the critic of utopianism, and above all Chesterton the literary stylist, with his wonderful apothegms and allegories and "Catholic koans." The Bad Chesterton, meanwhile, is the one whom Gopnik's readership could be counted on the dismiss even without his saying that they should: Chesterton the Catholic apologist, that is, and especially Chesterton the reactionary radical. This Chesterton's arguments, sez Gopnik, are always tainted by "the spirit" of anti-Semitism even he isn't actually being anti-Semitic, and this Chesterton's politico-religious thought, with its radical challenge to the contemporary left and right alike, can be dismissed as just a way station to Falangism and Franco.

The problem with this approach is that of course there was only one Chesterton, however many multitudes he contained, and those aspects of his thought that contemporary liberals find congenial often flowed from precisely the sort of premises that Gopnik deplores as reactionary and medieval. Gopnik begins the essay by praising Chesterton for his anti-imperialism, his skepticism about capitalism, and his criticisms of the "fatuous materialist progressivism" associated with H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and others; he ends it by caricaturing Chesterton's underlying philosophy as the royal road to Franco's Spain, while allowing, with a touch of condescension, that of course we should still read him, because if "obviously great writers were allowed onto the reading list only when they conform to the current consensus of liberal good will - voices of tolerance and liberal democracy - we would probably be down to George Eliot." But it's precisely because Chesterton, though a self-described liberal, didn't conform to the liberal consensus - both of his time and of our own - that he was able to keep his head while many of his contemporaries were falling over one another to embrace imperialism, or Social Darwinism, or Marxism, or eugenics (a topic, like distributism, that somehow fails to make its way into Gopnik's essay, despite being crucial to understanding Chesterton's importance as a writer). True, the things he was wrong about - the Jews chief among them, though the list stretches on to include a host of other matters as well - illustrate the weaknesses inherent in his sort reactionary radicalism. But the things he was right about, when the bien-pensant types of his day were badly, badly wrong, illustrate the weaknesses inherent in certain strains of modern liberalism, and if you rush to dismiss his premises as inherently tainted by anti-Semitism and crypto-Falangism, then you don't get to blithely congratulate him for his conclusions.

I think the problem with Gopnik's approach is thrown into relief by the embarrassed and/or dismissive way that many of the obituaries for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have treated the Russian giant's more politically incorrect ideas - his mix of Christian humanism, Russian nationalism, and deep skepticism about modernity, which made him something of a curiosity both during his sojourn in the U.S. and upon his return to Russia. From the Times complaining about his "hectoring jeremiads" and puzzling over his willingness to criticize "democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers" as well as Communists, to Christopher Hitchens griping absurdly about the "ayatollah-like tones" of his famous Harvard commencement address (the equivalent of comparing Chesterton to Franco), the coverage has often involved a Gopnikesque attempt to seal off the Good Solzhenitsyn from the Weird Solzhenitsyn, and to insist that the eloquent foe of Marxist tyranny can be celebrated even as the mystical reactionary is dismissed.

But as with Chesterton, the two faces of Solzhenitsyn were really one face: His witness against Communism emerged from the same ground as his critique of Western liberalism. When Hitchens writes that the great dissident's "mixture of attitudes and prejudices puts one in mind more of Dostoyevsky than of Tolstoy," he's absolutely right. But it's not a coincidence that Russia's two most eloquent and prophetic critics of utopian radicalism - Dostoevsky who attacked it in its infancy, and Solzhenitsyn who helped usher it into extinction - were both standing outside Western liberalism, while so many people inside liberalism busied themselves making apologies for terror and mass murder. Which is why Solzhenitsyn, like Chesterton, isn't important despite his deviations from "the current consensus of liberal good will." He's important because of them - because his deviationism allowed him to see things that others were blind to, and because reading past giants who stand foursquare outside the current New York Times/New Yorker consensus provides an opportunity to interrogate one's own premises, and ponder the ways in which contemporary deviationists might be right, and the contemporary consensus wrong.

Barack Hitler Obama

It's remarkable what those fiendish GOP operatives can squeeze into thirty seconds: Not only does McCain's "celeb" ad have "Barack Obama will rape yo daughters overtones," says Rick Perlstein (who's apparently under the impression that most Americans think of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as stand-ins for their daughters), but it was edited to blatantly evoke Triumph of the Will as well - the better to freak out elderly Jews in South Florida, perhaps. Comparing the "Celeb" ad to stills from Leni Riefenstahl's work, Perlstein writes: "I actually wonder if the Republicans had a crew on the scene to capture just the right angles; for instance, the identical camera placement shooting the speaker over the shoulder at stage right." If he actually wonders that, I fear for his sanity. Here's a tip for liberals: If your candidate is going to stage enormous rallies in front of tens of thousands of chanting Germans (with monuments to Prussian military might in the background) in the middle of his Presidential campaign, it isn't the GOP's fault if the footage comes out looking a little like Hitler at Nuremberg.

Gopnik on Chesterton (II)

If Gopnik is somewhat unpersuasive in his discussion of G.K. Chesterton's anti-Semitism, he is likewise unconvincing when he tries to argue that Chesterton's political ideals were fulfilled in Franco's Spain:

... he dreamed of an anti-capitalist agricultural state overseen by the Catholic Church and governed by a military for whom medieval ideas of honor still resonated, a place where Jews would not be persecuted or killed, certainly, but hived off and always marked as foreigners. All anti-utopians cherish a secret utopia, an Eden of their own, and his, ironically, was achieved: his ideal order was ascendant over the whole Iberian Peninsula for half a century. And a bleak place it was, too, with a fearful ruling class running a frightened population in an atmosphere of poverty-stricken uniformity and terrified stasis -- a lot more like the actual medieval condition than like the Victorian fantasy.

Here I'm with Commonweal's Matthew Boudway, who writes:

There are many good ways to interpret Chesterton's distributism, and there are good ways to criticize it. But this is not one of them. It is a very long way from the Napoleon of Notting Hill to Alcázar. Chesterton was, as Gopnik insists, a localist, but there was really nothing localist about Franco's regime, which was characterized by strict centralization, cultural uniformity, and militarism -- things Chesterton always opposed. (Ask a Catalonian about Franco's tolerance of localism.) Chesterton's main criticism of "Prussianism," and later of Nazi Germany, was not, as Gopnik says, that it resembled Judaism in its belief in a chosen people, but that it was essentially militarist and autocratic. Despite Chesterton's "medievalism," it is not at all obvious what sort of modern political mechanisms would have best embodied his distributist theory, which is arguably the theory's greatest weakness. What is clear is that distributism was as different from Franco's brutal politics as it was from Bernard Shaw's socialism. Gopnik is impatient with such theoretical distinctions. For him, it is all about tendencies: all radical critiques of capitalism tend toward Communism, which has failed, or toward some kind of anti-Semitic authoritarianism. One is allowed to have a few mild reservations about capitalism, of course, and even to look down at the pitiless people who seem to have fewer reservations (i.e., Republicans), but any less mild opposition to our political economy, whatever its name or origin, is headed toward trouble: if not the Gulag or the gas chamber, then the Inquisition.

Tellingly, that the word "distributism" doesn't even appear in Gopnik's essay. There are plenty of things to be said against Chesterton's vision of political economy - for instance, that like other attempts to forge an agrarian third way it's unmoored from the structure of modern economies and from contemporary politics as it's actually practiced. (I wouldn't go quite that far myself: I think there are real insights to be gleaned from distributism - some of which found their way into Grand New Party - even if its adherents have a habit of falling back on Middle Earth when asked for real-world example of their ideal society in action.) But whatever you think of distributism's merits, surely a politics whose chief weakness is that it's so impractical as to have (almost) never been tried ought to be immune from the sort of lazy reductio ad fascism that Gopnik's employing here.

Gopnik on Chesterton (I)

I've been meaning to say something for a while about Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker essay (not online, unfortunately) on G.K. Chesterton, which I didn't find nearly as excellent as Rod Dreher did. Gopnik is of course a brilliant writer in his way, but his way tends, as Rick Brookhiser aptly put it, to make his own sensibility the measure of all things. He's a classic example of the cosmopolitan as provincial: He has something clever to say about everything under the sun, but where something more than cleverness is called for he's often at a loss, or else inappropriately facile. His breadth is astonishing, his depth considerably less so; he's a liberal ironist who often seems unable to imagine how anyone could have ever been anything else. This means that he's precisely the right man to explain, say, a Parisian restaurant war to an American audience, or to gently mock the over-enthusiastic reception that greeted the Gospel of Judas. And it makes him a fine guide to G.K. Chesterton the literary stylist, where both his praise and his criticisms seem to me judicious and on point. Where other aspects of Chesterton are concerned, though ... well, not so much.

I'll start with his lengthy attack on Chesterton's "Jew-hating," which culminates in this peculiar passage:

The insistence that Chesterton's anti-Semitism needs to be understood "in the context of his time" defines the problem, because his time-from the end of the Great War to the mid-thirties-was the time that led to the extermination of the European Jews. In that context, his jocose stuff is even more sinister than his serious stuff. He claims that he can tolerate Jews in England, but only if they are compelled to wear "Arab" clothing, to show that they are an alien nation. Hitler made a simpler demand for Jewish dress, but the idea was the same. Of course, there were, tragically and ironically, points of contact between Chesterton and Zionism. He went to Jerusalem in 1920 and reported back on what he found among the nascent Zionists, whom he liked: he wanted them out of Europe and so did they; he wanted Jews to be turned from rootless cosmopolitans into rooted yeomen, and so did they.

Chesterton wasn't a fascist, and he certainly wasn't in favor of genocide, but that is about the best that can be said for him-and is surely less of a moral accomplishment than his admirers would like. He did speak out, toward the end of his life, against the persecution in Nazi Germany, writing that he was "appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities," that "they have absolutely no reason or logic behind them," that "I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe." Yet he insisted, "I still think there is a Jewish problem," and he denounced Hitler in the context of a wacky argument that Nazism is really a form of "Prussianism," which is really a form of Judaism; that is, a belief in a chosen, specially exalted people.

But the whole point of the "in the context of his times" argument is precisely that by the standards of the '20s and '30s, it was morally impressive for a political writer to reject both fascism and communism, to praise Zionism, and to speak out forcefully against Nazi anti-Semitism - and not in its eliminationist phase, but in its very earliest stages. (Chesterton died in 1936.) This does not excuse Chesterton's anti-Semitism by any means, but it makes him an odd target, out of all the writers and thinkers of that period, to single out for particular opprobrium. Here I think Gopnik is indulging the chauvinism of hindsight: The assumption that everyone who partook of the attitudes that helped make the Holocaust possible should be judged and condemned on the basis of what we know now, rather than what they knew then. It's the Goldhagen approach to assigning culpability, in which even people who opposed Hitler - even people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died fighting him - are to be judged, and harshly, if they failed to live up the standards that Western society only adopted after the Holocaust provided a terrible example of where these thoughts and impulses can lead.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it's worth pointing out that a great many opponents of slavery in the United States, Abraham Lincoln included, were racists in much the same way that Chesterton was an anti-Semite - possessed of ideas about black inferiority, the necessity of the separation of the races, and so on and so forth, that look morally abominable to us today. But it would be at least mildly peculiar to attack Lincoln, let alone the more strident abolitionists of that era, on the grounds that by saying that their racism needs to be understood in the context of their times we're just "defining the problem," because their time was the time when slavery was at its zenith. It was, sure - and they were the ones opposing it! Now of course Hitler had many critics purer than G.K. Chesterton, and Zionism had champions less bigoted - but not so many, in that dark time, that we can deny Chesterton at least a modicum of credit for getting certain big things right.

As for Chesterton's parallel between "Prussianism" and the conception of the Jews as a chosen race - well, Gopnik can call it "wacky" if he likes, but the notion that Nazi racial theories, and especially the half-baked attempt to forge an "Aryan Christianity" purged of Judaic elements, were rooted in jealousy and imitation of the Jews as well as hatred strikes me as a subtle and important point. (In George Steiner's instantly-controversial novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., he places exactly this argument in Adolf Hitler's mouth - and not, I think, merely in an attempt to dismiss it.) Indeed, I think the parallel is useful for understanding not only the Nazis but a wide variety of contemporary race-based theologies - from black liberation theology, to take a much-in-the-news example, to the more Arabist strains within Islam - that seek to claim for their ethnicity the particular favor that God has bestowed upon the Jews. Obvious, this sort of argument is outside Gopnik's intellectual comfort zone. But that's a problem with his narrow frame of reference, not the argument itself.

Albion's Seed

Without wading too deeply into the debate over my colleague Matt Yglesias's patriotism, let me just say that while I'm second to none (well, okay, maybe not none) in my appreciation for the American founding, I think that anyone doesn't feel at least a frisson of regret over how the split between the American colonies and Great Britain happened ought to return to their history books and reconsider.

McCain and the Bush Legacy

If, as I suggested yesterday, any rehabilitation of George W. Bush depends on 1) the post-2006 turnaround in Iraq continuing and 2) his getting credit for it, then I wonder whether a McCain victory in November would raise the chances that Bush's reputation will improve once he leaves office - as Bill Kristol, among others, has argued - or diminish them. To my mind, the biggest reason to expect that over the long run Bush won't get much credit for the turnaround in Iraq, assuming it persists, is that by late '06 he had become so (deservedly) unpopular that the selling of the new Iraq policy essentially had to be outsourced to other figures - John McCain chief among them. And if the Arizona Senator is elected President on the strength of his support for the Surge (while insisting that he had the right Iraq policy all along and Bush only came to it reluctantly, and when it was almost too late), then the election results will reinforce an already-existing narrative that associates the policy more with McCain than with Bush. Whereas if Barack Obama is elected President, after attacking the Surge and proposing a swift and complete withdrawal instead, and then finds himself - as I suspect he will - continuing the Bush approach (a very, very gradual drawdown) rather than taking the path he's advocated on the campaign trail, it may throw into relief for posterity Bush's ownership of what, with any luck, will be remembered as the best decision of his Presidency.

Those Who Can't, Re-Enact

Now this is how to teach history. (hat tip: David Frum)

What Is It About Mormonism?

Writing on Mormonism in this Sunday's Times Magazine, Noah Feldman becomes about the eighteen thousandth writer to explain that non-Mormon Christians only find the LDS faith weird and implausible because its revelation is so recent. Even though "there is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt," Feldman writes, for most people "antiquity breeds authenticity," because "events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time."

To which Alan Jacobs retorts:

But this only makes sense under the assumption that the only reason people disbelieve Mormonism is its recency. It seems not to occur to Feldman to ask whether all propositions of all religions are equally plausible or implausible. Is “antiquity” really the only factor at work here? If only a handful were attracted to the teachings of David Koresh, is the recency of those teachings a sufficient explanation? Such an assumption is simplistic at best. Let me be clear: I do not mean to say that Mormon beliefs are anything like the crackpot tenets of Koresh; I am just claiming that if you want to understand why certain beliefs are not widely respected or admired, you might want to know something besides how old they are. You might want to inquire into the actual content of those beliefs.

Moreover, if the Average Joe takes Judaism seriously than Mormonism — a proposition that may or may not be true — “antiquity” isn’t the reason. If that were the case, then the Average Joe would find the worship of Ashteroth, Baal, and Isis and Osiris as plausible as that of Yahweh. Insofar as people-in-general concede respect to Judaism, that’s not because of Judaism’s “antiquity” but because of its continuity. If we ever have Mormons who have been saying the same prayers to the same God for three thousand years or so, then those Mormons will almost certainly get a hell of a lot more respect than today’s Latter-Day Saints do.

Well said. I don't want to dismiss the "antiquity equals plausibility" argument, since it obviously contains an element of truth, but it tends to function as a conversation-stopper in intellectual discourse these days - as an easy out for secular writers who assume that all religions are equally implausible, or at least equally beyond rational examination, and who don't want to wade into the weeds of history, archaeology and comparative theology to see whether it might be otherwise. In reality, though, the major plausibility issue facing Mormonism isn't when and where and how long ago the events crucial to the religion are supposed to have taken place, but whether the Mormon account of those events feels persuasive as a historical narrative. This is an issue that faces every major religion that claims God intervenes in history; Mormonism's problem - and a major reason why its tenets are often "dismissed as ridiculous" (as Feldman puts it) by mainstream Christians - is that the Book of Mormon doesn't seem to stack up nearly as well in this regard as, say, the Gospel According to Saint Matthew.

Obviously, this historical-plausibility question doesn't matter to every believer, but it does matter (as it should) to an awful lot of people, which is why so much ink has been spilled by foes of Christian orthodoxy, from Elaine Pagels to Dan Brown, arguing from the historical record (as they see it) that the events of the Gospels didn't happen the way the Gospels said they did. The idea that it should be otherwise - that it's "indefensible," as Feldman puts it, to suggest that Roman Catholicism is more likely to be true than Mormonism because Saint Peter really existed whereas the Nephites probably didn't - only makes sense if you assume the premises of a materialistic (or fideistic) worldview. Which seems like a bad way to set about analyzing the beliefs of people who don't assume that worldview, which is what Feldman's essay is supposed to be doing.

The Auld Country

Alex Massie ponders the unusual sympathy among American conservatives for the cause, past and present, of Scottish independence; Larison weighs in here. Between them, I think they cover most of the reasons for this phenonemon. There's the “Cousins' War” dynamic, which both ethnically and ideologically connected the warring sides in Great Britain's 17th and early 18th century intra-island struggles to the combatants in the American Civil War, and thus created a natural affinity between the American Old Right and the Jacobite cause. There's the broader conservative preference for local self-government and traditional ways of life, which militates against the Protestant-liberal ideological project that unified Great Britain and brought the Highlanders to heel. More broadly still, there's the American tendency to romanticize our revolutionary period and look with disfavor on bossy Englishmen (a tendency that's particularly pronounced among conservatives), which breeds an affinity for anti-English revolts of all sorts.

It's the middle explanation, I think, that best tracks with my own philo-Caledonian sentiments. Despite some Southern roots in the family tree I have a Yankee's distaste for the Confederate cause, and I'm actually fairly partial to bossy Englishmen in many (though not all) historical contexts; my Jacobite sympathies, meanwhile, ultimately have more to do with regret over the eclipse of Catholicism in Great Britain than with Scottish liberties as such. To the extent that I find the Scottish National Party interesting, then, it's out of a combination of boyish Bonny Prince Charlie romanticism, instinctive small-is-beautifulism, and affection for, well, Scotland: I find the country intensely attractive in a variety of ways, and when you find a place attractive you naturally sympathize with people who say it ought to be free as well.

This is about as far as a serious weighting of the costs and benefits of disunion as you can get, and of course the SNP's historic commitment to socialism and the European Union is some distance from E.F. Schumacher and even further from His Most Catholic Majesty Charles Stuart, long may he reign. But then I don't pretend to be an authority on Scottish politics in any real sense; I just strike silly poses and leave the analysis to actual Scotsmen like Massie.

Photo by Flickr user Peter Macdonald used under a Creative Commons license.

The Lincoln Wars

Noah Millman, on pieces like this one:

I freely admit my partisanship towards the victorious Union cause, but I do not recognize that cause as described by Lincoln’s idolators.

This seems like a particularly fine way of phrasing a sentiment that I happen to share.