A father in Maine is appealing to the US Justices, wanting them to reinstate a $5million verdict against these protesters who showed up at his Marine son’s funeral. Thus, the Supreme Court will review whether the protesters’ messages are protected by the first ammendment, which intertwines freedom of religion with freedom of speech and press.

Whaddya think, folks? Personally, I’ve been fiercly perturbed by people who spout “you can’t legislate morality!” without quite fully explaining themselves and/or completely understanding the full depth of their dictum. My own view: one cannot not legislate morality. Having a constitution is in and of itself a certain morality. And in this recent fiasco, I think the Supreme Court may finally be encountering the delicacy of this situation.

If one wishes to equate “freedom of religion” with “amoral legislation,” one will soon discover that the American public will become a brutal lot playing on a brutal stage. One will then have no right to throw out “thank God for dead soldiers.” Or, one must accept that legislating morality cannot be avoided, that “freedom of religion” does not mean “amoral legislation,” but “freedom” (a value, a moral) as set forth and interpreted by the US.

What think you?

In these events, the canons from which presidents draw their allusions point to what texts, exactly, presidents believe unite the nation. These texts tend to be the speeches of past presidents and the American metanarrative of history. I wonder why more topical allusions are so sparse? It seems to me that the real textual soul of the American public lives on HBO and The New York Times Best-seller List, in the blogosphere and on iTunes. But our rhetorical events imply that all of this is perpetually relegated to the social, while the political contains only a narrative of American history that bespeak our national virtues. Admittedly, presidential speeches are highly ritualized occasions. For a president to ignore the responsibilities of allusion to the formal history cultically presumed on these occasions would be a sort of violation of his role, a transgression of his office. But is it wrong of me to wish that when our presidents address the past year of American political life their words could be enriched by a larger view of the life than the mythic political-formal one?

But I am interested in pluralism as a form of public self-subversion.

The necessity of self-subversion, to repeat a common theme of this blog, arises from the finitude-denying tendencies of the human psyche — ie., pride requires a fall. The recognition of subtle and deluding aspirations to hegemony in our own hearts should lead us to carefully prevent ourselves from ever achieving the kind of power — intellectual power or, dare I say it, social or political — that would free us to carry out these aspirations. Yet self-subversion is manifestly difficult when pursued in private or by oneself. The result is often not so much dialectical as self-deceivingly predictable — one practices a reverse psychology on oneself such that every “subversion” actually contains the kernel of our heart’s original but cleverly withheld intention.

But advocating pluralism — provided one seriously advocates pluralism, not strategic political correctness — seems to be a really fool-proof method of self-subversion. Nothing subverts one’s own stated position so well as common dwelling, common projects, common discourse with dissenters from it. So it seems to me that there is a profound self-subversive quality to advocating pluralism.

All this of course does not supersede other arguments for pluralism.

Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, “Oh, didn’t you learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust.” This is the eternal topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder. Their idea is a return to pragmatism, “Let’s strictly distinguish politics from ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute.” What I aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this conclusion.

Among the idols we love to smash are pleasure, power, and reason. Among the idols we love to smash in others more than ourselves are self-righteousness and wealth. Among the idols we mostly fail to smash (or see for that matter) is family.

Is it even possible for family to become an idol?

I don’t mean particular families, but family as an ideal whose preservation and extension overtakes the place of more central things in human thought and action. Two examples:

First, at Dordt an objectionable attitude reigns, that singleness (as a vocation) is not merely unusual but actually abnormal, or even deviant. This manifests as an assumption that guys should be shopping for a wife and girls for a husband. The result is rampant objectification where, for example, I might not objectify you just as a sex-object but as (to coin a term) a wife-object.

Part of this is surely attributable to our privileging of family as an automatic subsidiary (or primary?) purpose of Dordt education.

Second, family-value politics, to which many Dordt students would subscribe, can work a strange reduction. Such an agenda can reduce the purpose of political action to creating a public life conducive to a certain theory of child-rearing. According to this theory, children should be sheltered as long as possible from the more “shocking” results of sin in the world (usually vulgar language, sexual aberration, and gory violence).

Expand this to a political vision and you have an agenda that prioritizes something like the appearance of sexual normativity in our military to the weightier question of the morality of our wars.

Part of this is surely attributable to our extending the preservation of traditional family life to a total political agenda.

What would our world look like if we smashed the idol of family?

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[...] For a moment, step back with me from specific texts, and consider in general the political and spiritual opposition I have just tried to draw out of Erasmus’s colloqy [A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake].

I said the earthly city has a political purpose of stability. It anchors the geography around it, such that everything outside of it is described in relation to it. Where locations were formerly designated in relation to various equal points of interest, the land is transformed by the presence of the city into a centric spread, connected by arterial roads to a central heart. The centrality of the city allows industries to lean upon each other, stabilizing the whole by augmenting the power of production and gathering raw material together from many sources. Talent is drawn to the city, which becomes a center of entertainment, of creativity, of the acquirement and dissemination of knowledge, a warehouse of ideas and experiences, rendering outlying places gray, tiresome, and uninspiring.

All of this ingathering and conglomerating serves the basic purpose of rendering human society in its fullness stable. Grand visions, as of a tower of Babel, no longer energize our brick-layers, but a fear of the danger of ungathered living drives us together to build walls against the wilderness. We weave our practices and institutions together until they become interdependent.

Our laws serve this political vision of stability. The laws keep us from destabilizing each other’s lives by disruptive self-assertion. Obedience to the laws, an obedience driven by the desire for stability, is the only condition for citizenship in the earthly city.

Because stability is the meaning of earthly city life, although initially political in scope it becomes spiritual by appealing to the heart, to the center of individual people. The desire for stability in the face of life in the fallen world overwhelms all other desires. The demands of individual relationships and moral convictions must give way before the demands of the city, of the desire for stability. It becomes more important to be a good citizen than a good son or daughter, sister or brother, husband or wife, mother or father. In this way, the political vision of stability can be said to become a spiritual possession, demonic in scope and power. Moreover, we are born into cities, presented with the spiritual vision of stability as a default stance toward life.

In contrast to the spiritual vision of stability, Christianity urges a spiritual vision of mobility. We have in the church the citizens of  a city unbuilt. The church stands in opposition, politically, to the earthly city precisely to the degree that the earthly city stands in opposition, spiritually, to it. To allow the desire for stability to overpower all other desires—which is precisely the tendency inspired by the structure of the earthly city that I have described—is a kind of idolatry for the Christian. Consequently, although to be a Christian does not preclude living in an earthly city, still to be a Christian means resolutely resisting spiritual possession by the earthly city’s ideal of stability. Because this kind of spiritual vision possesses one as a result of the structural tendencies of the city, the Christian inevitably subverts the earthly city where she dwells simply by refusing to submit to its spiritual dominion.

The whole purpose of this extended exposition of the meaning of the earthly city and its political opposition to the church was by way of defining the context of pilgrimage as a category for interpreting specific Christian ideas and practices. When I speak of the ensuing texts as interpreting Christianity in terms of pilgrimage, I mean that they interpret life in terms of this opposition between the spiritual visions of the earthly city and the church. [...]

One of the most fascinating things about Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is the history of its slow accretion of content from a simple four part booklet to a voluminous tome. One aspect of the Institutes that remained the same through these evolutions, however, was the introductory dedication to King Francis I. The irony of this dedication is that Francis was the instigator of bloody persecution of Calvin’s own religious compatriots, a persecution that resulted among other things in Calvin’s own life of exile from France.

I plan to blog through the Institutes this year, in honor of Calvin’s 500th. But the work is so extensive, so complicated in the influences that wrought it and the effects it wrought upon posterity, that I need a compass to find my way through the wilderness of its pages. I have chosen to make the circumstances of the book’s original composition and also the dedication to Francis my compass.

What do I mean?

I mean that the reflections I post here and the strains of text that I will sniff out will relate to a thesis I have about the emphases of Calvin’s theology. Every theology, as a man-made body of reflection upon God as he reveals himself through Christ and infiltrates the smallest corners of our lives, must be flavored by the context of the theologian. This puts to rest the fantasy of a final or complete theology, and raises the process of theology to its appropriate place as an intellectual expression of piety. The piety of John Calvin, as we have it in the Institutes, is flavored above all by a dual polemic: first, against the Roman church and, second, against the political power that aided the Roman church in opposing the Protestant revolution. The key to Calvin’s rhetoric (in the sense of the broad purposes for which he marshaled particular ideas in particular ways) is in many ways summed up, I think, in the couplet that heads this post.

The Institutes originated as a plea, a plea for the cause of his fellow religious revolutionaries. The Institutes continued as a textbook, until Calvin could claim the following about its final form:

“… I believe I have so embraced the sum of religion in all its parts, and have arranged it in such an order that if anyone rightly grasps it, it will not be difficult for him to determine what he ought especially to seek in Scripture, and to what end he ought to relate its contents.”

In other words, Calvin believed that one of the chief functions of the Institutes in their final form would be to introduce readers to a framework that would help them better turn to and understand Scripture.

But even as the Institutes became pedagogical in this way, it remained a plea. The specter of subjugation, by the illusions of heresy or the arguments of power, remains in the background of Calvin’s text. Although one of the chiefly noted aspects of his political views, as detailed in the final section of the Institutes, is a commitment to patience under governance, in other ways the book is one gigantic protest against the ideologies of the Roman church and its political allies. Calvin argues that true power belongs to God alone, and that this knowledge enables those who love and serve him and whom he loves to persevere as citizens of the kingdom of God.

This compass, the dual nature of the Institutes as plea and pedagogy, will guide my reflections as I work my way through the book, touching down to blog about passages that are landmarks on the path that this compass marks out.

The process that leads Broughton from the dream of wealth to disillusion with the path to wealth very much mirrors an argument made by Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue regarding the myth of managerial expertise.

First, consider the two chronological extremes of Broughton’s notion of Business. His dream ignites, as dreams do, from a brief glimpse into the heart of a South American business magnate’s offices, where he sees a clean and handsome man and woman cheerfully working in an elegant room for what was clearly excellent wage. He felt, he writes, as if he had glimpsed “a better world.” This idea of a better world festers in his soul until he casts caution to the wind and takes his family to Cambridge, Massachusetts to study at Harvard Business School. But at the far end of his adventure, we find him in an entirely different frame of mind. His idea of a better world has been tempered by exposure to the true lifestyle of the successful businessman (on the Harvard model): an anxious, nervously aspiring person whose personal life and family relations have crumbled at the altar of devotion to ambition. On the far side of a Harvard MBA, he finds that he no longer wants that world, and he graduates one of the few in his class without a job.

The central insight that catalyzes this transition is an astonishing truth: Harvard Business School, at its most technical and erudite, cannot actually provide a technical or theoretical key to the accumulation of wealth. Instead, the sons and daughters of this alma mater chiefly inherit a name (or, more precisely, a brand). The Harvard MBA as such—as letters and an institutional affiliation—is what sets its graduates apart and can lead them to wealth.

An interesting dichotomy develops in Broughton’s experience between the experience of the visiting speakers at the Business School—such as Stephen Schwarzman and Warren Buffet—and the usual post-graduate experience. Broughton and his fellow students idolize the bigwigs who address them from positions of financial power. They desire above all the secret to someday filling shoes of a similar size. Yet, Broughton comes to realize, often the success of these business gods is due to uncanny and unteachable intuition or to the kind of windfall success that can’t be planned. His own entrepreneurial attempt to start up a podcasting business fails. In the event, he discovers that wealth for the ordinary Harvard MBA must come from slavish expenditure of time in unrewarding corporate settings—an access to wealth, certainly, but one made possible by the assistance of the Harvard brand and by hard social and personal sacrifices rather than by an acquired wizardry with business.

What we observe in Broughton’s disillusion is a concrete deflation of the myth of managerial expertise.

According to MacIntyre, one of the three chief “characters” or models of contemporary moral behavior is the manager. The manager operates through bureaucracy, “the rationality of matching means to ends economically and efficiently.” And the justification for the manager’s power in contemporary society is his perceived status as one who can control society based upon certain law-like generalizations for social behavior that are his expertise. This is Broughton’s initial aspiration: to become a manager by acquiring expertise in the law-like generalizations that will enable him to control his own social condition.

But MacIntyre goes on to show that this authority of the manager is duplicitous. The managerial character cannot reasonably lay claim to expertise regarding law-like generalizations about social behavior, because social behavior is so far from being understood, much less predictable, that any social scientific generalizations about it can at best resemble the proverbs of ancient cultures. There is no science whose predictive power merits the authority that the managerial character has arrogated to itself in this age. Instead, the power of the manager is maintained by good acting, by maintaining the illusion of predictive power.

The illusion of predictive power: the Harvard MBA, for one.

I heartily recommend Broughton’s memoir. In addition to a fascinating glimpse into one of the nests of the fledgling managerial class that so much of the world respects and consequently serves, it provides a concrete demonstration of the moral vacuity of the ideals of that class. The real social power that rests on the imagined predictive expertise of the managerial character deserves to be undermined. That would be social progress. Ahead of the Curve takes a step in that direction.

In most circles, canons of literature (and canons of art and music) have suffered the moral equivalent of a heart-attack. They have been stopped in their tracks by the accusation of cultural imperialism. About time, too.

Of course, when I say that “canons” are dead, I mean it in the grand, old sense. In a broader sense, just about everyone has their own canon these days. There are theorists here and there who argue that every age has always had its own canons—even before we “lost” the classical tradition. People valued different elements of that tradition depending on their historical and cultural perspective. But this point misses the point that before the loss of the classical tradition different people were valuing different elements of the same books.

I dare you to name even a single book that you think most college-educated people have in common these days.

We tend to develop intersubjectivity with local readers—local according to geography, academic emphasis, political proclivity, religious conviction, or social position. We don’t mingle incognito among other educated people outside of our locality as easily as when the foundation of every education was “the classics.” One name for this condition is “the splintering of Western civilization.”

Enough apocalyptic.

Frankly, our condition arises from a worthy revolution. Even a superficial examination of the history of “the Classics” reveals that none of them attained or maintained that position according to some objective standard of excellence. Invariably, a canon is the symptom of some class, racial, religious, or otherwise ideological hegemony; its overthrown, the symptom of unshackling.

All of which brings us to the question, what should we do? Hide in our localities, growing apart and inevitably hostile, tiny cultural nation-states pursuing a universal policy of isolationism?

One solution—which I reject—in horror at the lack of cultural intersubjectivity, attempts to reintroduce a widespread knowledge of “the Classics” (according to the justification that they explain to us who we are and how we got here). But that, obviously, is little more than a denial of the cure that canon-subversion has effected for our ideological blindness. Getting to know who we are in this way is indistinguishable from getting to know who are not, and consequently amassing the most appalling set of pathologies regarding the low, the different, and the unexpected. I offer, instead, that we are confronted (and, indeed, undergoing) a radical revaluation of the meaning and function of culture itself. I know that the following suggestion will set off alarm bells for a number of reasons in many heads, but here goes anyway: I would compare the developing cultural consciousness (at least as far I am aware of it) to the daily life of a fellow who’s just kicked a nervous eating habit. For this man food, which used to be inappropriately constitutive of his peace and identity, resumes its proper place and by diminishing in quantity rises in his consciousness. Similarly we, having kicked the oppressive habit of mainting cultural canons, are forced to find new things to constitute our peace and identity (and the stage for our friendships), while at the same we are freed to appreciate literature in its uniqueness.

Still, it’s hard to kick a nervous eating habit, to stage a friendship in a world without canons. It’s a downside of freedom, but we struggle on.

… anti-autobiography means not just not writing your autobiography, an astonishly prevalent practice, but writing it in such a way as to outwit the prurience and immodesty of the genre by frustrating your own desire for self-display and the reader’s desire to enter your inner life.

Having just completed The Gatekeeper, I feel as if that sentence is the key to what Eagleton was doing. I understand, I think, some of the reasons one might opt to write an anti-autobiography.

Autobiographies create the same moral traps that journals do. I’ve ditched more journals in moments of self-disgust than I can count. On the one hand, I found myself agreeing, with R.L. Stevenson, that journals tended to become a “school of posturing and melancholy self-deception”; but on the other hand, I always felt a strong urge to accomplish something like the literary and spiritual monument of Jim Elliot’s journals. Elliot’s first entry famously includes the following passage:

What is written in these pages I suppose will someday be read by others than myself. For this reason I cannot hope to be absolutely honest in what is herein recorded, for the hypocrisy of this shamming heart will ever be putting on a front and dares not to have written what is actually found in its abysmal depths. Yet, I pray, Lord, that You will make these notations to be as nearly true to fact as is possible to that I may know my own heart and be able to definitely pray regarding my gross, though often unviewed, inconsistencies.

Admirable as Elliot’s sentiments undoubtedly sound, and even though the ensuing notations offer good reading, he hardly escaped the moral trap of immodesty and prurience. Perhaps some people can write journals candidly. But those of us with even the slightest delusions of grandeur, transform all our journals into autobiographies.

I suppose when I said earlier that journals and autobiographies create the same moral traps I should actually have said this: autobiography is the moral trap of a journal.

Given how disgusting and self-deceiving it is to surreptitiously write an autobiography in the form of a journal, who can face unashamedly the massive rudeness of writing one blatantly, openly, without apology?

In an essay on history, Hannah Arendt mentions two kinds of historical objectivity: first, objectivity in presenting multiple perspectives and interpretations of an event; second, objectivity in selecting what moments of history to record. Supposing that biography is a subset of history, then, and realizing how impossible the above-mentioned forms of objectiviy are even for the most meticulous and detached historians, we can definitively cast aside the hope of attaining any objectively historical idea of a person from their autobiography. In fact, as I recently read somewhere (I can’t remember where), most autobiographies are disguised (or not so disguised) apologia.

Consequently, autobiography presents us with a moral conundrum in its very name. Pretensions to presenting a history of the self by the self are, as Eagleton notes, immodest—and, he might have added, dishonest.

Hence, anti-autobiography.

But how does Eagleton accomplish this? The Gatekeeper is after all a book whose unifying theme is the experiences of Terry Eagleton. Or is it?

Good marxist that he is, Eagleton does not miss the opportunity to use even himself as a pretext for political commentary. The real purpose of the book seems to be hidden in front of us in the title. The Gatekeeper. Eagleton served as a gatekeeper in a Carmelite convent when he was a child. In the first chapter of the book, he fascinatingly describes his duties and the environment in which he performed them. He saw himself as an operator of the passages between two worlds—the virgin, self-immolating, magically-removed world of the nuns, and the rough, lower-class neighborhood in which both he and this other world existed. As the gatekeeper, Eagleton imports insight gained from both worlds to the other, where he uses that insight to caustically criticize each world. This dynamic continues for the rest of the book, as Eagleton uses his life as a pretext for fleshing out the various permutations of the role of the gatekeeper, or, we might as easily say, the critic.

Ultimately, in other words, I suspect that Eagleton wrote his anti-autobiography by way of presenting his notion of the critical role, complete with examples and theorizing on the subject.

In some reviews of the book, I have read complaints that readers leave it with almost no understanding of Eagleton himself. I suspect Eagleton would accept these complaints as compliments. I, for one, can only admire his revolutionary method of genre-subversion. There are other ways of avoiding immodesty and prurience—embracing the urge to apologia from which they develop, for example, and making no pretensions to biography, as John Henry Newman did in Apologia Pro Vita Sua. But Eagleton’s method is intriguing, and I am glad to have encountered it.