Old Buildings

In her landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs defines the success of a neighborhood in terms of people on the streets. A healthy neighborhood, she argues, has people on the streets, doing things and going places, through all hours of the day. This is important, first of all, for safety: as long as there are reasonably responsible "eyes on the street," crime will not be a problem. (She notes that these eyes don't need to be especially responsible: you don't need heroes, you just need people who are awake enough not to let someone get beat up. Despite the horror stories the press likes to blow around -- stories that are very rare and have mostly proved to be be simply untrue -- ordinary people don't stand by while people are getting raped. Criminals know this, and any city dweller knows that the only dangerous street is a quiet one. Note that the grisly murders and rapes happen in Central Park at night, not in "dangerous" Harlem during the day.)

These eyes on the street provide the context for a vibrant street culture, with places to go and things to do. Jacobs calls this "secondary diversity": if you have the right mix of urban fundamentals, the little things that make life interesting pop up. Harvard Square has jugglers and fire-breathers because there are people there to watch them. And any decent neighborhood gets coffee shops, used-book stores, and parks full of people only when there are enough people around to frequent them. (A point Jacobs does not particularly ponder is that there must also be the proper economic conditions. I recently read that to open a home hair-breading salon in Detroit, you need no less than seventy permits: government can squash even healthy neighborhoods.)

Jacobs identifies four material requirements for a vibrant urban neighborhood: density, mixed uses, small blocks, and old buildings. The first two are obvious enough. The first thing a vibrant neighborhood needs is enough people to support all that "secondary diversity"--and indeed, people packed close enough together that you can walk places, stopping to look at things, instead of having to drive.

"Mixed uses" simply means that you have people there during business hours and after-business hours. It's hard to run a restaurant -- or anything else -- in a single-use neighborhood that is empty half the time: you need a lunch crowd and a dinner crowd if you want to make ends meet. And if the sidewalks are mostly empty half the time, they will be taken over by derelicts. Without eyes on the street, bad people move in.

Small blocks are less obvious but equally important. The point is simply that you must be able to walk from point A to point B in various ways. Super-blocks require a person to walk to work -- or the bus stop, or the park, or wherever one goes -- the same way everytime. In so doing, they effectively counteract density. Imagine a dry cleaner's, or a coffee shop: if you can't plan a route from A to B that goes past, you're probably not going to make use of these businesses. Super-blocks effectively build walls through neighborhoods.

But perhaps least obvious is the need for old buildings. Or rather, old buildings are often valued for the wrong reason. Partly claiming Jane Jacobs as an authority, neighborhoods like mine have established "historic districts" to preserve antique beauty. They place all sorts of requirements on owners -- effectively driving out all but the super rich, who can afford wrought-iron fences, manicured gardens, brick walks, and old-fashioned shingles.

But this is exactly opposite to why Jane Jacobs says old buildings are necessary. Old buildings are necessary, she says, because they're cheap. New stuff always carries the price of construction in the mortgage. That's why, for example, malls and strip malls are filled with high-turnover box stores: a poky ma-and-pop place can't afford the rent. Jane Jacobs's greatest fear for her neighborhood was that some do-gooding urban renewer would knock down all the "derelict" old buildings and replace them with brand-new stuff: effectively driving out all but the box stores and fast-food restaurants. Ironically, Jane Jacobs thought a neighborhood could only maintain the beauty of life by having crumbling old buildings for artists, ma-and-pop stores, and all the eccentricity that makes city life great. Those who drive out all but high-priced antiques change the city from a living organism to a museum -- and drive out the middle class in the process.

Old buildings is, I guess, the one place where Jane Jacobs almost understands free-market economics. Frankly, the market is something she never seems to have pondered, libertarian though she was in most respects. Indeed, in standing for old buildings, she partly stands against capitalism, almost begging for the government to protect us from "cataclysmic" development. But even there, Jacobs knew that the real threat to a diverse neighborhood is the government: only eminent domain can clear out blocks at a time.

The real way to stand by Jane Jacobs' old-buildings criteria is not by piling on highfalutin' government museum mandates, but by telling government to leave us alone so that the little guy can have a chance to contribute his necessary two cents to the margins of the neighborhoods. Only the government can take away all the cheap places to do business.

Traditional City Living

Civis has been away for some time, to finish his dissertation in theology. With any luck, I'll be back on-line now and blogging regularly. Thanks for your patience the last few months. Please pray for a successful dissertation defense on May 5!

Many orthodox Catholics (and other people of traditional sensibilities) agree that country living is best because it is most traditional. I agree with the major premise of this argument: it is best to live according to tradition. Or rather, it is best to live in line with tradition. It is not right, I think, to reject everything modern, which would ultimately be a rejection of human reason, but neither is it right to break entirely with the past. A truly Catholic understanding of tradition, whether ecclesial or social, reads with what Pope Benedict calls a "hermeneutic of continuity" instead of a "hermeneutic of rupture." Vatican II referred to this as "organic development": not breaking with the past, but growing naturally from it, with firm roots.

Although there are obvious religious and moral implications to this -- human nature and divine religion do not change! -- tradition is important even from a secular perspective. The political philosopher Friedrich Hayek, in fact, argues for small government precisely to preserve the wisdom of the ages, which is far too rich for any social planner to understand. Miss Manners teaches us not just conventions, but the little means tested over centuries to help smooth social interactions. Tradition means preserving the wisdom of the ages. Traditional living means a lifestyle that can benefit from our traditions: religious, moral, and merely social.

Here, however, I want to challenge the minor premise of the "traditional living" argument. Modern "country living," I would like to argue, is far less traditional than city living. I'll approach the question through literature, because literature gives us a glimpse of what "normal" life looked like. I'll have to be brief in order to scan a lot of literature, but I hope this will provide a lens for further reading.

Let's start with Nathaniel Hawthorne, a representative of life in New England in the first half of the nineteenth century. I wish only to note that the entire milieu for The Scarlet Letter is intensely communal. The story would be meaningless if Hester Prynne lived in rural isolation. Indeed, the ultimate punishment is to be banished from the company of the broader community -- not just immediate neighbors, but the town. I note that the opening chapters, "The Custom House" and "The Marketplace," set a scene that is not only urban but commercial: life is lived in close contact with strangers. There are problems, to be sure -- perhaps the point of the book is to challenge the way people dealt with this communal life -- but there is nothing of isolation, except in punishment.

I have no representative of Southern literature at hand -- only because I'm working on the fly -- but I would note that Jefferson wrote his romances about "yeoman farmers" with the leisure gained from slave labor. Indeed, as any visitor to Monticello can tell you, the best thing you can say about Jefferson's life is that he lived as master of a town, in close contact -- not just with his favorite neighbors (though the Madisons did often drive over and spend the night) but with people whose relationship to him was primarily commercial. The people of Monticello shared nothing in common except a place and a set of commercial interactions.

Let's move to the West. Here is Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy. It's been years since I read it; I believe Almonzo later ended up her husband, out West. But he grew up on a farm in rural New York: a good contrast to Hawthorne's more urban setting. Just flipping open the book, I see it begins with the children walking to school. It's not clear how far the walk was, but it was close enough that a nine-year-old child with only two pairs of socks could get there through an upper-New York snowstorm without suffering any ill effects. This is not city living, but it is even less like modern "rural" life. How many rural children walk to school today? Opening the book this way sets a scene of life in community: these are not people who live as rural recluses, but small farmers in close contact with their neighbors. Nor are their neighbors members of a commune: they are drawn together not by a desire to live in intentional community, but by the need to exchange commercial goods.

This economic community sets the stage for higher kinds of community. Chapter 16, "Independence Day," tells the story of riding the wagon in to "the Square," a space defined by the railroad station, to hear the band play and the Congressman give an address. On the way there through the "countryside," the streets are crowded. There are friends to be seen in town, of course, but the backdrop is strangers: "Hundreds of people were there, crowding to watch."

Like many, of course -- though far from the majority! -- Alonzo eventually went West, to where he met Laura. Little House on the Prairie (I picked it out of her many books only because it's most familiar) shows us true rural isolation. Chapter 17, "Pa Goes to Town" says it was a four-day journey, requiring a neighbor to come over every night and tend the family. This, I think, is a much better parallel to what modern traditionalists consider "rural" living: no contact with anyone but friends.

But is it desirable? The chapter ends with the joy of Pa having purchased glass windows. Discussing these things with agrarian traditionalists, I have often been pooh-poohed for my crass materialism: isn't family more important than stuff? Of course it is. But let me note that traditionally, "stuff" wasn't seen as such a bad thing -- and the stuff came from town. Even the most rigorous agrarians of the American West still pined for the latest modern conveniences, and treated them as nothing but joy. Meanwhile, the threat of Indians, wild beasts, health crises, and natural disasters define most of the chapters -- and I think it's pretty well agreed that Laura Ingalls Wilder played down just how threatening their life was. Nowdays people flee the cities for safer places, but traditionally, there was nothing more dangerous than rural isolation.

(An aside: to my knowledge, none of the recent school shootings has been in an urban environment -- most have been in suburbs, one hit the Amish. The terrifying Washington, DC, sniper stayed outside the city limits, preferring places of greater seclusion in the suburbs. Gruesome murders, from what I can tell, are pretty evenly distributed wherever there are human beings; they usually happen within families, so fleeing the city won't help you there.
The only "danger" of city living is gang violence. If you're curious about how "random" this violence is, check out this crime map of Philadelphia: look at how many people got murdered, then limit it to only white people. Modern-day urban crime isn't random, it's a scourge on the black community, which white people have chosen to run away from. Consider this statistic: last year, 1 in 7,500 Americans across the country died in a car accident (42,284 fatalities out of roughly 300 million). Philadelphia, the most violent of America's ten largest cities had 61 homicides among 680,000 white people, less than 1 in 10,000. So the average American is more likely to die in a car accident than to get killed, if they're white, in an especially dangerous and depressed city. And that's leaving out the role of behavior in determining which white people get murdered. If you want to survive this next year, move somewhere where you don't have to drive, stay out of gangs, and make sure you aren't black. Compared to other places, cities are no more dangerous now than they were in the past.)

Back to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House on the Prairie opens with their reason for going to the prairie: "Pa said there were too many people in the Big Woods now." Urban sprawl is not a new thing. Even in nineteenth century Wisconsin, the flood of people trying to live in seclusion meant not many places were secluded. Just like now, everybody moved to the "edge of civilization," and the wilderness was swallowed up. Why did Pa keep running away? Laura says he liked wild animals. But an awful lot of people went West because, like Hester Prynne, they had social problems. Traditionally, rural seclusion was a rare thing and not an entirely healthy thing.

Even in the West, Tom Sawyer is a more typical setting. Who can forget Tom running into his friends while painting the fence in chapter 2, "The Glorious Whitewasher"? Even running away down river brought them into continual contact with strangers. Characters like Becky Thatcher, Injun Joe, and the slave Jim (in Huckleberry Finn) are strangers, met on the way. From what we can see in Mark Twain, life in the "small town" of the old American West was not about seclusion and not about associating with just the people you liked. Traditional living meant constant contact, on foot, with strangers. I think this is a lot more like modern city life than anything in the country.

Of course, the US is strange, because for most of our history we had a wilderness. To conclude, let's take two glances at traditional life in England. First, consider the novels of Jane Austen. I just reread Emma and have it beside me, but I don't know how to make a good selection. For fans of Jane Austen it will probably be sufficient to say this: her drama revolves entirely around people walking from house to house and running into people they didn't expect to see. Reduce life to seclusion and only voluntary contacts, and Jane Austen's world is gone. I wish I could say more, but I don't want to go on all day.

For our last reading, let's go back a few centuries. The setting is London, around the year 1500. This is our first look at a Catholic country: although Henry VIII and his love-child Elizabeth were soon to impose a Reformation, I think scholars are now pretty well agreed with Eamon Duffy's thesis in The Stripping of the Altars that the Reformation was entirely forced on the people of England, who were deeply engaged in their faith. Our window into this world will be the research of Peter Ackroyd, one of the great writers about the City of London, in his vivid biography The Life of Thomas More. Here he's talking about the seven-year-old More's walk to St. Anthony's school on Threadneedle Street. I don't want to be pedantic, but this is great stuff, and Ackroyd has done his homework, so I'll quote at length (I'll summarize at the end, so you can skip the quote if you prefer):

On his customary journey of a few hundred yards from Milk Street to Threadneedle Street the young More passed the church of St Mary Magdalen near the corner of Milk Street and Cheapside; there was a cross in its churchyard which was 'worshipped by the parishoners there as crosses be commonly worshipped in other churchyards'. When he walked into Cheapside itself, or more accurately 'West Chepe', there stood in the middle of the thoroughfare a tall water fountain made of stone and known as the 'Standard'; here for two hundred years the citizens had filled their basins and pitchers with water, lately being taken from the River Tybourn. It was also a place of execution, and in More's childhood sentences of beheading and burning were exacted on this spot only a few feet from his house. Violent death was not hidden from the gaze of children. On the other side of West Chepe, beyond the Standard, stood the church of St Mary-le-Bow. The famous Bow Bell was rung each evening for curfew; this was the time for the shutting of the city gates and, to the delight of the apprentices, the closing of the shops. In More's childhood the tower was actually being rebuilt and was not completed until 1512 but still the bell tolled, according to season, at eight or nine o'clock. The tower had been brought forward to front 'West Chepe', and beside it stood a stone building with a gallery on its first floor known as the Seldam or the 'Crown slid'. It had been erected at the command of Edward III as a convenient site from which royal guests might watch the various pageants and triumphs that procedeeded down Cheapside on ritual occasions. But by More's time it had been leased out as business premises and was itself surrounded by other 'slids', sheds or shops. These were owned principally by mercers and haberdashers, together with the goldsmiths mentioned by the Venetian diplomat [in the previous chapter]. The old 'Chepe' had been crowded with street-stalls and street-sellers, but much of its atmosphere still survived in the late fifteenth century. With the ancient and familiar cries of 'satin!', 'silks!', 'foreign cloth!' and 'courchiefs!', it is appropriate to imagine the surroundings of an eastern bazaar or souk; the fifteenth-century city was closer to contemporary Marrakesh than to any version of post-Restoration London.

Thomas More turned left and walked down this relatively wide thoroughfare of mud and cobbles towards Poultry and Threadneedle Street. On his left hand he passed St Laurence Lane and Ironmonger Lane, among stone buildings with figures placed in niches, gilded and painted signs, timbers decorated with carved fruits or flowers, painted walls and gables, roofs of red tile, wrought iron poles bearing lamps, piles of dung and chips from firewood which had been chopped in the street before being taken indoors. In St Laurence Lane there was a large inn for travellers, known as Blossoms Inn, and in Ironmonger Lane there was a small church named St Martin Pomary on account of the apple trees which had grown in the vicinity. The whole quarter had once been the home of saddlers, tanners and tallow chandlers, but mercers had displaced them in one of those changes of commercial activity which are explicable only in terms of the city's own organic and instinctive growth.

There was, however, one other important former inhabitant. On the corner of Ironmonger Lane and Cheapside had stood the site of Thomas Becket's birthplace, now his church of St Thomas of Acre or Acon. So the young More passed each morning the memorial to the most famous of all London saints and martyrs. He proceeded east, past the Mitre tavern and the church of St Mary Colechurch which was 'built upon a wall above ground, so that men are forced to go to ascend up thereunto by certain steps'; it took its name from the coal and charcoal trades, like that of the smiths and ironmongers themselves, which had grown up around it. As he passed Old Jewry (from which the Jews had been expelled two hundred years before) he would have seen on his right hand, in the middle of Cheapside, the Great Conduit which had been erected in 1240 to provide sweet water from Paddington, carried in pipes of lead. In a contemporary map, it is possible to see the vessels of the water-carriers lying on the ground beside it.

Thomas More then took the left-hand turning towards Poultry and the Stocks Market; the poultry of Poultry are self-evident, but the 'Stocks' was actually a covered market-house for fishmongers and butchers. It took its name from a pair of stocks, for punishment, standing in the open space beside it. These were the streets and alleys among which More would spend most of his working life; he attended sessions, as under-sheriff of London, in the Compter or prison by Poultry and was also a member of Doctor's Commons, which met within the Court of Arches in the crypt of Bow Church. So the young Thomas More walked by Poultry and the 'pissing conduit' at the south end of Threadneedle or Three-neadle Street, passing several more parish churches and many 'fair and large' houses, until he came to a well at the meeting of Broad and Threadneedle Streets; just behind it, on the corner, stood St. Anthony's School. . . .

At the end of the day, after his release from school, it was a short journey from Threadneedle Street to Milk Street. The city surrounded More once again, and he noticed everything: his prose works are filled with brief but vivid intimations of London life, from the sigh of someone squatting against a wall in order to 'ease hym selfe in the open strete' to the beggars who display their cancerous or cankered legs on 'frydays about saynt sauyour and at ye Sauygate', from the 'meretrix' [prostitute] and her 'leno' or procurer to the wrestlers at Clerkenwell who take 'so great fallys'. He made his way among the pumps and springs and water conduits, past the gardens and the markets and the almshouses, along small lanes and even smaller footways, between the stables and the carpenters' yards and the mills, past brothels and taverns and bathhouses and street privies, under archways adorned with the images of saints or coats of arms, into courtyards filled with shops, beneath tenements crammed with the families of artisans, moving from the grand houses of the rich to the thatched hovels of mud walls frequented by the poor, hearing the cries of 'God spede' and 'Good morrow!', past nunneries and priories and churches. . . .

To be sure, the London of Thomas More's day was thoroughly Catholic; that's very different from the modern city. But I suspect encountering Protestants is the last of the modern parent's worries about bringing children to the streets. In his short walk to school, Thomas More saw extreme violence: not only the stocks where criminals were humiliated in the streets, but also the place of frequent executions and "wrestlers"--I think we're talking about open violence on the streets; this was a city where bear-baiting was considered good fun. He saw people defecating in the streets and people who were not just miserably poor but poor and ulcerous. And he openly viewed prostitutes and brothels as part of his daily walk to school. This is the very neighborhood where not just one but two of England's greatest saints were raised.

Along with the sex, the violence and the foulness, however, look at the crowds! On his short walk to school, he passed the cite of frequent pageants, street markets, businesses of every kind, and rooming houses of travellers. And I love Ackroyd's decision of the harmonious tumult of business: "those changes of commercial activity which are explicable only in terms of the city's own organic and instinctive growth." The old Catholic city was alive and changing, crowded, dirty, and glorious.

Of course, not everyone grew up in the cities. Medieval Europe was dotted with farms. In the time of Jane Austen, the farmers were tenants of great lords. In earlier times, they were "serfs," a friendly translation of a word that means nothing but slave. Of course, some masters were kind, just like some masters in the US South were kind to their black slaves. But let's not romanticize feudal serfdom. There's a reason they sang "the city air makes you free."

Now, I haven't proved that city life is good. You might still say that you want your children to grow up like Laura Ingalls Wilder, not St. Thomas More. All I want to argue here is that city life is much more traditional. Rural seclusion is not traditional. Complete control of who you see is not traditional. Traditional life, whether on a farm in upstate New York, on Thomas Jefferson's plantation, in Mark Twain's Missouri, in Jane Austen's English countryisde, or in Thomas More's London, was life on foot, among strangers, with the cry of the marketplace all around you. If it's traditional living you want, come join us in the city!

Is Ron Paul right?

I mentioned in my previous post that I think I'm going to vote Ron Paul in the primary. Let me say at the outset that this is still a purely pragmatic decision. Ron Paul can't win, and I'd be less likely to vote for him if he could. He's a purist, and I'm not sure that makes for good governing. I liked Giuliani for the same reasons I like Paul -- but Giuliani is less pure and, I thought, better at winning political battles. (Ironic that Paul's the last one standing.) I think I'll vote for Dr. Paul mostly because I just don't care whether Romney or McCain gets it. Either is acceptable, neither is very good.

Now, the message I want to send by voting Ron Paul is purely domestic. It's the same argument I made for Giuliani: I think that social conservatism (in other words, civilization) requires limited government. The most critical issue for me is the Constitution: both because I believe in the rule of law, and thus obeying the laws we have, and because I think it provides a remarkably wise form of limited government. (Incidentally, that's why I'll vote GOP no matter what this fall: judges.)

But the sticking point with Ron Paul is foreign policy. He wants out of Iraq. He thinks Muslims would stop blowing up our buildings, trains, planes, etc., if we just got our troops off the Saudi peninsula. He wants to eliminate the CIA. This is nutty stuff.

His argument is twofold. Internationally, he thinks our cause is better served by a less confrontational stance: confrontations escalate. Domestically, he thinks war begets big government.

The domestic part really grabs me. I think it's hard to deny, historically, that Woodrow Wilson and FDR were eager to get into Europe's wars not only (maybe not even primarily) for humanitarian or geo-political motives, but because it gave them the authority to institute progressive policies at home. Of course the New Deal was already in place -- but FDR's policies only took off, and only produced the dirigist prosperity he wanted, with the War. This is an argument that was made directly by The New Republic at the time -- and it is one that has kept them pro-war and pro-big government ever since.

The argument is even more intriguing, however, looking at this primary season. John McCain's only "conservative," or even Republican credential is his support of the war. There should be no question that without the war, he could never have gotten this far. (Indeed, Bush creamed him pre-9/11 running on a less interventionist foreign policy and criticizing Clinton's actions overseas.)

Consider Rudy Giuliani, too. Now, as I've argued (link above) I like Giuliani for his domestic policies. And he probably lost on his domestic policies, namely his failure to reach out to social conservatives. But would Giuliani ever have considered running such a campaign if he didn't have the War on his side? Without Iraq and 9/11, he wouldn't have run, wouldn't have gotten as far as he did, or would have had to reach out as a complete domestic conservative.

I don't like Mitt Romney, but he surely would do better if people weren't wondering what kind of Commander in Chief he'd be.

And of course Ron Paul himself would be much much more popular with conservatives if it weren't for the war issue. He is by far the most consistent conservative of all the candidates -- except on the war.

In short, this primary suggests that Dr. Paul is right: war makes people, even conservatives, care less about limited government.

But what about on the foreign side? Is it really "right" -- morally or practically -- for us to run away from the battle in Iraq? Let me say that I have been very much in favor of Bush's conduct of the war -- but I may be coming around.

I think a couple distinctions are important. The first is between the Soviets and any other enemy. Historically, conservatives only got interested in meaty foreign policy when fighting the USSR -- before that, as Ron Paul often notes, conservatives were the party of non-interventionism, and Democrats the party of muscular foreign policy. (Though there is some question-begging here: it's not clear to me, based on my limited knowledge of twentieth-century American history, that there were what we call conservatives before the anti-Communist Bill-Buckley insurgency of the 1950s.) In any case, the Soviets were a different kind of enemy because they were big government incarnate. In that one unique instance, it was easy to make the case that we should fight our enemy overseas and limit our government here at home, because the two were inherently linked. Normally, that just isn't the case -- and it certainly isn't the case with al-Qaeda. Without any clear link between war and limited government, war naturally leads to the growth of government.

But an even more important distinction is between moral relativism and pragmatic non-interventionism. What drives conservatives so nutty about liberal critiques of the war is that they often equivocate about us and the enemy, as in Ward Churchill's infamous statement that the dead on 9/11 were "a thousand little Eichmanns." Conservatism is, at its heart, moral realism; conservatives can't stand to hear this kind of equivocation. Same goes for saying the Israelis are the same as Hezbollah and Hamas, or even comparing them to Hitler, as is too-often done. There is a difference between democratic states and terrorists who kill civilians.

That's what makes people angry about Ron Paul's statements. When he says 9/11 is the result of us having troops in Saudi Arabia, it sounds like he's justifying the actions of terrorists, and even "taking marching orders from the enemy." Are we supposed to just run away? But of course, that's where the argument starts to shift. Of course you run away from a place that gets you killed. In addition to the moral question, there is also a strategic one: granted the terrorists are wrong, what should we do?

In this fascinating interview, Ron Paul makes a very interesting point about Ronald Reagan. Reagan was not afraid to call the Soviet Union the "evil empire." He was not afraid to fight them and defeat them, and he certainly didn't believe in coexistence with moral evil. BUT he didn't invade. He beat them economically, he beat them morally. Part of that was a weapons build-up, which Ron Paul probably opposed (in company, by the way, with John Paul II and Benedict XVI). But Reagan did not win the Cold War by force of arms.

I have argued elsewhere that the best way to overthrow truly evil governments might be business as normal, swamping them with personal communication, American trade, and the normalcy that challenges their lies. I hope to pursue that argument further. Ironically, Ronald Reagan, the hero of muscular-defense conservatives, may be the greatest proof: he never equivocated about the sheer moral evil of Communism, but that didn't mean he put troops on the ground.

Those who know Western history recognize that the battle with Islamo-fascism (or whatever you want to call it) is as old as Islam itself. But here's an interesting point: we tried to invade in the Crusades, and failed. We then retreated to defense by sheer force of arms -- and barely kept them at bay. When did the tide start to turn? Not when we sought military might, but when our own culture advanced. The victory was won at home, not abroad. Of course, we have had to fight them in the Mediterranean every step of the way (think Barbary pirates). But as our civilization advanced at home (at least on the technical level -- we can debate elsewhere the cultural challenges of Modernity), the Muslims became more of a nuisance than a challenge.

Instead of fighting in Iraq, for example, why not promote democratic peace and prosperity in places like Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan? (Note: I don't know much about these countries. I do know they aren't our enemies.) Could we strengthen Lebanon without using guns?

In short, I may be coming around to Ron Paul's point of view. War isn't worth it. We have better "weapons," and war provokes further attacks and, much more importantly, the loss of principle at home. Better to have Ron Paul than John McCain.

The WASP

As long-time readers of this blog know, I've been really taken with E. Michael Jones' The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing. Jones, it must be said, is a conspiracy theorist nutjob in bad need of an editor -- but I think he's onto something, and his historical argument seems hard to refute.

The thesis of the book is that the death of our great American cities in the twentieth century was not, as commonly believed, a tragic mistake from well-intentioned efforts at improvement, but an intentional move to wipe out immigrant communities, who threatened the Establishment through their labor unions, political power, and different religion (primarily Catholicism, with its strong critique of Establishment sexual mores).

I was interested in the urban-planning angle, but Jones is interested in the ethnic struggle. Key to his argument is a shift, around 1930, from a racial to a class understanding of ethnicity. This shift allowed the Establishment to "convert" the Irish, Poles, and Italians (and others) by moving them from their ethnic communities to the suburbs.

It also opens up for us an angle from which to understand the WASP Establishment. My stock is solidly WASP. But I'd always taken it in purely racial terms: yes my ancestors are Anglo-Saxon, and thus necessarily white and almost necessarily Protestant -- but what does that have to do with anything? What Michael Jones helps us see is that WASP is not so much a racial inheritance as a state of mind.

WASPs understand themselves as the chosen race. They long ago gave up on ideology. (Indeed, I would argue, though Jones probably would not, that this is part of their strength: pragmatism allowed the English and Americans to be more principled by being more wary of half-baked theories.) They are successful and powerful, and consequently look down on other ethnicities, with their silly religions and hang-ups.

WASPs are good men, with a strong sense of honor and duty, and a natural reverence for tradition and country. But they do not believe in ideas, in part because ideas challenge their hegemony. WASPs are authorities, not to be trifled with -- to do so would insult their honor and integrity.

I bring this up, of course, because John McCain seems to have wrapped up the Republican nomination for president. John McCain, of course, is an honorable man. He fought for his country in Vietnam, and when offered a chance to get out of a Viet Cong prison camp where he was being tortured, he opted to stay with his comrades. Can't beat that for honor.

He's also a "straight-talker" -- which means he shoots from the hip and doesn't care what anyone thinks about him. That's certainly "honorable," and mostly commendable. It also has something to do with his total lack of ideas. Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that McCain is inconsistent, or wishy washy. Those things he is not. I'm just saying that his consistency is based in his gut, not his brain.

Consider his position on Iraq, which seems to be his strongest issue. He supported the "surge" when no one else did; now that the surge seems to be successful, John McCain is the man of the hour. Fine. I support the surge now, and I supported Bush's decisions back when he was "keeping a small footprint" -- so McCain was right and I was wrong. But really, McCain's position comes down to little more than bellicosity: he wanted to fight bigger and harder. Fine. He was right. It seems to have worked. But that's not a theory, it's just an impulse. (And honestly, what I've read about Petraeus' successes seem to indicate a lot of theory, a lot of good ideas, and not just "Surge!" David Petraeus, by the way, is Dutch.)

Consider McCain's position on torture. I hope I don't misrepresent him here. McCain made a lot of noise "opposing" the Bush administration on this issue. But it was all a lot of bluster, because, so far as I know, he never entered a serious discussion of what constitutes torture. I think torture is absolutely wrong, always -- but the "moral syllogism" also requires a minor premise, which states what particular practice we're opposing. Big moral statements don't get us very far. (This, I suppose, also plays into McCain's environmentalism: fine, protect the planet -- but against what, and how?)

Even worse, though, I believe McCain said that of course he would use torture if it were absolutely necessary to protect the country--I hope I'm not misrepresenting him. This is the same mentality as the WASPs who ran World War II: we oppose the inhumanity of the Nazis and Japanese, so we'll only directly target civilians with nuclear weapons and -- worse -- firebombing if we really think we need to. Oh. This is thinking with the gut, and sometimes it leads to gross immorality.

Of course John McCain is "pro-life." That means he mostly votes against abortion -- which is good, and follows from John McCain's basically good moral sense. But when it comes to the government funding research on embryos, suddenly he shifts to pure utilitarianism. So, is it wrong to kill the unborn, or not? Forgive me if I seem simplistic, but this sounds like thinking with the gut. A good gut, but guts don't get you all the way.

(For the record, Steve Long's new book on Thomist moral principles gives all the tools to think through this question with great precision. On embryo research, pro-lifers are not the ones thinking with their guts.)

And then there's judges. He wants "clones" of Sam Alito and John Roberts (Catholics), who believe the Constitution means what it says, and is absolutely binding on judges. But he is also tremendously proud of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform, which asserts that when the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," it implicitly means, "except if the speech or press might be critical of someone running for office." So which is it, Senator? An honorable man, John McCain thinks we should uphold tradition, and thus the Constitution -- except when we don't like it, because we perceive it to allow too much money into politics. (Incidentally, has anyone noticed a great decrease in political money since 2002?)

Will I vote for John McCain against the Democrats? Absolutely. His instincts are pretty good. At least he more or less cares about somewhat limiting the dominance of the federal government in our lives, and somewhat protecting "traditional" marriage (which I guess John McCain would see as a matter of tradition, instead of, as it is, a matter of nature and biology), and somewhat protecting the unborn, and somewhat protecting the Constitution. He's certainly willing to make moral distinctions in the international law, instead of this goofy business of equating Islamo-fascist terrorism with any form of legitimate military force. He's not all bad.

And WASPs aren't all bad. But as the example of The Slaughter of Cities helps us see, they aren't to be trusted, either. Their guts sometimes lead them to make imprudent decisions, often make them forget moral distinctions when the going gets rough, and brook no dissent from us lesser forms of life who are benighted by the belief that ideas matter.

So I'll vote for John McCain against Hillary or Barrack. But in the primary, I think I'll take Ron Paul, just to send a sign that I'm not happy with unprincipled government.

"Pro-Life"

I participated in the March for Life today on the National Mall here in Washington, with my wife and two small children. It's always inspiring to see all the lovely people: the men and women religious in their habits; the priests leading groups of fervent parishoners; the crowds of young people first discovering politics through this most important of issues, the sanctity of life. It's encouraging to see how peaceful and beautiful, and at times devout, the groups are. It gives a sense that there is still hope for our culture, and it makes me darned proud to be Catholic.

It's also a lot of fun, because the March for Life is like the national Catholic family reunion. There are people we only see this one time each year, and good friends who make a special point of getting together on this day.

With some of these old friends, and surrounded by all the beauty of the pro-life movement, I got a couple chances to explain my advocacy for Rudy Giuliani, the one "pro-choice" candidate in the Republican race, and the strongest hope for those who would like to see both parties run abortion advocates for president.

I think my case is strong. Guiliani's policies on abortion, as on other important social issues, like the defense of marriage, is the same as the other major candidates: he pledges to nominate judges who are bound to the Constitution, instead of pushing their own non-Constitutional agendas, thus eroding the judicial logic of Roe v. Wade; he thinks partial-birth abortion should be illegal; he has pledged to maintain, even with the veto pen, the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortions. He's glad embryonic stem cells are no longer an issue, so that he doesn't have to take a stand on federal funding. There's not a lot else a president can do, apart from advocacy at the UN and pressing things through the Justice Department--and none of the other candidates has anything to say about these things, either.

The difference with Giuliani is that he calls himself "pro-choice." To my knowledge, the only time he's defined that during this campaign, he said he opposes putting women in jail for abortion; fine, so does every serious pro-life voice. (Fred Thompson brought up the same strawman of putting women in jail, got some grief from pro-lifers, and nonetheless got the endorsement of National Right to Life.) Still, it rightly gives us pause to hear him label himself pro-choice. What does it mean? What does it signal about his commitment to good judges? What would he do with the Department of Justice and the UN? And what kind of message is he trying to send? Is he trying to marginalize the pro-life movement?

Those who know Giuliani's history know that in his first political contest, he ran to be the first pro-life mayor of New York. He lost, then ran again calling himself pro-choice, and went on to do nothing for the pro-abortion movement--and, indeed, oversaw, somehow or other, a fall in abortion rates unmatched in American history.

So why does he call himself pro-choice? I suspect he's tired of flip-flopping, and label politics. At the so-called Values Voters Forum last Fall, he tried to pitch himself as someone you can trust, because he doesn't just remarket himself for every campaign. (Unlike, say, some of the other candidates?) That pitch failed. The pro-life movement doesn't trust him. Maybe they shouldn't--maybe I'm all wrong.

That's the trick with politics: along with policies, you have to judge the candidates' characters, and it's easy to be wrong. And the candidates have the same problem: they have to try to communicate their characters--and hide their flaws--and sometimes they screw up. I think Giuliani probably blew it on this one, just like he seems to have blown it by not campaigning in New Hampshire and Michigan. That's a strategic error. But maybe he really is pro-abortion, and the pledges he's made are all lies, or subterfuge. Who knows?

I told a friend at the March that I support Giuliani, also, because I think his governing philosophy is most likely to produce a conservative culture. I believe in limited government. I believe that low taxes isn't just a give-away (and certainly isn't any more of a give-away than liberal economic policies), but an investment in the people, a way of asking them to make wise decisions for themselves, and so create the kind of rich culture and vibrant economy that only myriad decision-makers can create. I believe that government interference on things that aren't absolute right-and-wrong issues demoralizes the people, and creates the kind of moral thoughtlessness that so prevails in America today. I believe that the only way to produce good people is to let parents make their own decisions about their children's education. I believe that a just society depends on the rule of law, and the rule of law depends on a judiciary that judges, not according to personal preference--not even good personal preferences--but according to the actual written laws: first the fundamental law of the Constitution, and then the laws of elected Legislatures. And I believe that if government takes over health care, the only way to keep down costs will be rationing, which will not only reduce the quality of our care, but also put life-and-death decisions in the hands of a government that cannot be trusted: no matter whether the nicest Baptist preacher you ever met is President, nationalized health care will end in forced abortion and euthanasia. Because the more power you give government, the more likely it is that corrupt politicians will take it over, with promises to serve the majority at the expense of the weak.

For these reasons and others, I think being pro-life and socially conservative is necessarily linked to a broader, traditionally "conservative" agenda. And I have made the prudential judgment that Rudy Giuliani is the most likely to fight for this agenda. So as a social conservative and a committed pro-lifer, I support Rudy Giuliani for president.

Still, it makes me sad that the argument has to be so complicated, involving so much guesswork about what these guys really think and will really fight for. Seeing all those committed pro-lifers at the March today, I wish they could just say, "Giuliani calls himself pro-choice, so we will do everything in our power to stop him from taking over the Republican party." And I wish that Giuliani would just switch his label, and pursue the same policies while calling himself pro-lifeWhy can't it be easier? Why can't we be united behind simple labels?

But then, that's the nature of democracy. (And indeed, of the whole moral life). It just isn't simple. You have to think through all the issues, and the governing philosophies that inform them. You have to weigh the characters of the candidates--and weigh the statements of the Press, to see if what they say about the candidates is true. (Based on my research, for example, I think the standard narrative about Giuliani's personal life is outright libel, based on nothing but the rumors of the liberal New York media.) I wish it were simple--I wish life were simple!--but it isn't. And so good people will disagree about prudential decisions, especially the prudential decision of what candidate will best serve our culture, and best protect the most basic rights of the most vulnerable among us.

What can we do, except do our best, argue it out, and pray that the Good Lord will watch over this blessed country we love so much?

Trial of Faith

As any classical grammarian will explain to you, “of” is an ambiguous word. (Classicists refer to it as the “genitive,” but it’s the same thing.) The word after “of” can be the object of the word before: the love of horses means that the horses are what’s being loved. But the word after can also be the subject of the word before: the beauty of horses refers to something the horses have. Sometimes, but not always, a phrase is ambiguous: the love of Sally could mean Sally’s love for horses, or it could mean Tommy’s love for Sally. This is an interesting ambiguity in the phrase “love of God.”

Sometimes, of can also indicate an identity between the words before and after. The “law of the seas” is an objective genitive: it’s the law that obtains over those at seas. But the “law of gravity” is not a law over gravity, or in the realm of gravity; it means that gravity itself is a law. I’m not sure how grammarians categorize this one. It could be a subcategory of the subjective genitive, like “beauty of horses,” so that of would indicate a particular aspect of gravity, the part that is a law. But that seems wrong. Probably this is another kind—I’ll call it the genitive of identity—so that “law of gravity” means neither the law that rules over gravity nor the law that gravity possesses, but gravity itself, which is like a law.

(Sidenote: in Latin, at least St. Thomas’s Latin, “natural law” is usually not lex naturale but lex naturae: the law of nature. You get very different ideas of natural law depending how you construe this genitive: is it objective, the law that rules over the state of nature? or is it subjective, the aspect of nature which serves as a law? or is it a genitive of identity, nature itself taking the place of law. I believe St. Thomas understands it in the last way, but moderns, especially in the wake of Kant, construe it in the first.)

What occasions these reflections is my perusal of the new book on Mother Teresa, which reveals the darkness of her life of faith through her private letters to priests, and which I received for Christmas this year. I’ve only perused it, so these reflections are based more on my reading of theology, especially Garrigou-Lagrange (who shows up a lot in the footnotes to the Mother Teresa book) and the Neo-Platonic strands of St. Thomas. And other saints, especially Thérèse of Lisieux.

So here’s the question: if Mother Teresa’s interior darkness is called a “trial of faith,” or “test of faith,” what does of mean?

The standard assumption is that it’s an objective genitive: faith is what is being tested. So we assume that anyone who goes through that kind of darkness must have a lot of doubts about whether God really exists. Their faith must be sorely “tried.” How can you believe what you don’t see?

But, of course, when you put it that way, it’s a stupid question, and you see that “trial of faith” can’t be an objective genitive: you can only believe what you can’t experience. That’s what belief means. That’s what faith means. If you can see, then by definition you aren’t believing. Faith is always dark. That’s what distinguishes it from sight. (And that’s why we call heaven the “Beatific Vision”: where faith gives way to sight.) The lack of evidence can’t, by definition, “try” our faith.

(This is not to say that faith is contrary to evidence. Indeed, there is lots of evidence, both historical and metaphysical, to confirm what we believe. But nonetheless, faith is by definition what you believe because you have been told, because you have heard, not seen.)

I think the correct way to construe “trial of faith” is as a genitive of identity: faith itself is a trial. But—and here’s the key point—it’s more of a trial for those who love more. For us schleps who really aren’t that interested in God, we believe what we don’t see, but it really doesn’t bother us whether we see or not. Faith isn’t a trial if the darkness doesn’t bother you.

But for the saints, for those who really love God, who desire his presence more than anything, faith is a horrible trial, because faith is defined as distance, inability to see the one you love. Mother Teresa’s darkness was not some strange trial imposed on her, not the removal of something that the rest of us have. Rather, the darkness we all have became a trial through the addition of love. She experienced her distance—the distance of all of us wayfarers—with acute pain because she didn’t want to be distant.

Which is why the great spiritual writers insist that the “dark night of the soul” (a subjective genitive) is common to all the saints. Those who do not experience darkness are by definition not saints. If your inability to see God doesn’t bother you, if the life of faith (objective genitive) doesn’t drive you crazy, you don’t love enough! Of course, most of us don’t. But we shouldn’t be surprised when we encounter darkness. We shouldn’t be surprised when prayer ceases to be fun. We shouldn’t be surprised when the more we advance, the more we seem to recede. Because in the life of faith, we are distant from our Lord. He who does not ache for heaven is not really a Christian.

And the Spirit and the Bride say, “Come!” And he who hears [the believer?] says, “Come!” And the One who thirsts will come. And he who desires will receive, by grace, the water of life. — Apc. 22:17

A Criterion for Good Literature

My wife and I are avid readers, and hope our children will be as well. We are bibliophiles, acquiring books wherever we can, but we also try not to be packrats, so we are continuously pruning our collection. We are thus concerned—as every cultured person should be—to decide what books are worth reading.

It should go without saying that not all books are worth reading. This is not to deny that reading is a good in itself. Reading develops the imagination, cultivates an appreciation of silence, and improves literacy: that is, the more one reads, the more one is able to read, with a longer attention span, a greater vocabulary, etc. But these are all secondary goods, ordered to something beyond themselves. Only a good imagination is worth developing; to take the limit case, a pornographic imagination, which even most popular novels encourage, is far worse than having no imagination at all. Silence is good because it aids contemplation; but if one’s silence is filled with garbage and unreality, it would be better to get out into the real world. And literacy is good only if you use it to read good books; one can be quite a “good” reader, but so acclimated to crap that one is quite unable to read real literature.

A preliminary, but too simplistic, criterion for good literature is whether it helps or hinders our ability to read Scripture. Novels that make your heart pound, or brusque magazine captions, may make Scripture less accessible. But noble stories can help us appreciate the nobility we find in Scripture.

But although this criterion is a start, it is obviously too simplistic, both because it doesn’t explain what makes a story noble and because it doesn’t cast any light on what it means to read Scripture, and why one would want to.

Perhaps a better criterion may be found in the classical idea of text actuation. In the pre-modern world, I am told, it was expected that one would memorize texts and then use them to articulate one’s one situation. To use the example of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, in a time of great difficulty, one might imagine the terror and quiet nobility of Frodo and Sam as they entered Mordor. Comparing one’s own situation—confronting someone in the office, volunteering to serve the poor, or even fighting distractions in prayer—to Frodo’s, one might be able to “re-read” the situation, to see the value of pressing on against extraordinary odds, taking one small step at a time, etc. Or the silent nobility of Aragorn (so horribly misrepresented in the movies) might help one to appreciate the nobility of underappreciated perseverance. One might see one’s own quiet works, or one’s neighbor’s, as somehow parallel to a scorned ranger who will one day receive his crown.

A friend recently shared with me how he saw his own process of conversion in the light of Charles Ryder’s in Brideshead Revisited. On the last page of the book, when Charles genuflects before the battered old tabernacle in poor misused Brideshead, then returns with a happiness that Hooper can never understand, many Catholics find an image of their own inexplicable faith, emerging from all the highs and lows of a sinful life, ever drawn by that providential grace of “a twitch upon the thread.”

Most books, I think, are only marginally open to such actuation. When Harry Potter fights Voldemort (I don’t know the stories well, having read only the first one, years ago), I guess we can see some image of our own efforts to stand up against evil, somewhat parallel to Frodo and Sam. But does Harry’s experience really parallel ours? It seems to me—ignorant of the stories as I am—that what makes Harry Potter attractive is not the parallels between his struggles and ours, but the parallels between our will to power and his magical abilities. We are most likely to actuate these texts, I submit, in daydreams about flying, wishes that we could make household items levitate, and other desires to be snazzy. In other words, the Harry Potter texts become “actual” to us more in daydreams than in our real lives.

The idea of text actuation gives some precision to other ways of evaluating books. Even secular people recommend Harry Potter because he is exciting, and makes us want to read—but to what end? Christians and other people motivated by morality argue that Harry presents the battle between good and evil, and that is surely true. The question is, does Harry Potter help us to understand our own struggles with good and evil? It seems to me that he falls short, both because the good and evil of these novels bears little relationship to the good and evil of our own lives and because what really engages people about Harry is not his struggle with good and evil, but his magical abilities; an imagination trained on Harry Potter is an imagination that looks for occasions of magic, not occasions of moral heroism.

(Again, let it be said that I am not an expert on the Harry Potter texts; I hope that the principle I am articulating can make sense even to those who disagree about this application.)

My wife and I have been discussing, somewhat fruitlessly, a children’s book about wood sprites, gnomes, and tiny trolls. I think the principle of text actuation does apply to children’s literature. In the case of small children—though not in the case of adults—the development of imagination is an end in itself. Many of Dr. Seuss’s books, including favorites of ours such as McElligot’s Pool, If I Ran the Zoo, and the supreme If I Ran the Circus, focus on imagination itself: the main character looks at an ordinary situation and imagines how he could enrich it. Such books encourage imaginative play—and imaginative play that builds upon ordinary experience. And the wonderful, and wonderfully accessible, poetry of Seuss encourages the child to articulate his imagination, to think of verbal articulation as a good in itself. Trying to “be like Dr. Seuss” by rhyming about the world and our embellishments thereon means verbal practice, a central task of the toddler years.

The Pooh stories are more subtle—and, I have found, less appealing to the very youngest audiences—because they tend to come closer to great literature, considering themes of friendship, exploration, and creative problem-solving. When, during a flood, Pooh’s “missage” in a bottle brings Christopher Robin in an upside-down umbrella to rescue him from up a tree, we experience the joy of homecoming, the creativity of using what we have in unexpected ways, and the surmountability of all our little troubles. Indeed, I think one of the most wonderful things about Pooh is that all the pickles he gets in are funny, encouraging us—and especially young readers—not to take our own predicaments too seriously. But also in Pooh, one of the great joys is little songs: again, a focus on articulation, encouraging us to “be like Pooh” by playing with words and verbally exalting little things.

What about the wood sprites? I have argued, negatively, that they provide a parallel universe, little people whose lives are like ours but with none of our problems—like a sitcom. To the contrary, my wife argues that these stories encourage us to look at nature as something magical and alive, to see a tree not as a dead shape, but as a world unto itself. The real quesiton, I suppose, is how the target audience reads the stories. I suspect that my negative argument applies only to adults: yes, I see the little people as a parallel universe, but my little boy sees it as his universe; that is, he doesn’t wish he could be a wood sprite, with an alternative morality (or whatever I was imputing), but gazes at the trees and wonders if the wood sprites are there, and contemplates how beautiful a forest is, what a magical world surrounds him.

The example serves, I think, to show how the theory of text actuation helps us rethink a text—and how our judgments can fall short when we fail to appreciate how the text is actuated for the real-life reader. What matters in Harry Potter, as in the wood sprites, is not what theories we can lay over the text, but how it comes alive for the people who read it: what draws them in, and thus how the text allows them to re-read their own situations.