What do you get when you click on an article in First Things, that heady brew of theological harrumphing first set in motion by frenzied spiritual striver Richard John Neuhaus, about whom I (mostly) snickered here? Well, judging from this piece by the site’s editor, R.R. (Richard Russell) Reno, “End Times Anxiety”, you’ll learn a little, you’ll laugh a little, and you’ll conclude with a piece of sustained derision.
Surprisingly (or not), the Catholic Dr. Reno and I have a similar reaction to “Modern Times”, at least in part:
“Our present cultural moment is one of suspicion, anxiety, and worries about vulnerability. Many, perhaps most, fear that they are being discriminated against and marginalized. And those who don’t? They often live in the fear that they will be accused of white privilege or some other sin. Perhaps this is to be expected. Patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity—they are said to infect everything. One area of public discourse immune from the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion is wonkish policy debate. But this is dominated by economistic thinking, which takes as its first premise rational self-interest. Here, too, we’re pictured as eyeing each other with competitive suspicion.
“The anxiety baffles me. Our society works pretty well. In many cities, crime is down dramatically, reaching historically low levels. The economy grows, both here at home and globally. American war-making has settled into a pattern of limited engagement that leaves most of us undisturbed. Meanwhile, public culture rings with warnings that things are heading toward disaster—global warming, resurgent racism, populism. Every week our office receives review copies of another book that promises to show us how to “save liberal democracy.”
Okay, I could do without the snicker about “postmodern hermeneutics” and the cutesy putdown of “rational self-interest”, but, hey, the guy’s Catholic. RR rumbles on a bit—well, more than a bit, actually—and then quotes to good effect someone I usually don’t care for much at all, Peggy Noonan, to wit:
“When at least half the country no longer trusts its political leaders, when people see the detached, cynical and uncaring refusal to handle such problems as illegal immigration, when those leaders commit a great nation to wars they blithely assume will be quickly won because we’re good and they’re bad and we’re the Jetsons and they’re the Flintstones, and while they were doing that they neglected to notice there was something hinky going on with the financial sector, something to do with mortgages, and then the courts decide to direct the culture, and the IRS abuses its power, and a bunch of nuns have to file a lawsuit because the government orders them to violate their conscience… .”
Well, again, I don’t think the IRS is abusing its power, and I don’t think the Little Sisters of the Poor should complain about being required to offer health care plans to their employees that provide free birth control pills,1 but the fact that Wall Street was rewarded for blowing up the economy,2 and that neither the Bush nor the Obama Administration had the nerve to walk away from a series of disastrous and counterproductive wars,3 not to mention occasional bloody acts of terrorism in the U.S. by isolated individuals (and not al Qaeda or ISIS or any other international terrorist group), are fundamental contributors to our national malaise.
I could go on in this vein for some time, but I already have, well, almost constantly for the past ten years, but my most recent “big picture” outburst, “Paging Dr. Yeats! Paging Dr. Yeats!, appeared only a couple of weeks ago, so I won’t belabor the point, except (and, okay, this is a pretty big “except”) it would be nice if Peggy, and maybe R.R. would admit that 1) the Republican Party started all these goddamn useless foreign wars and keeps looking for new ones (e.g., Ukraine, Syria, Iran, China) and 2) did their level best to not only prevent President Obama from countering the effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression but actually sought to wreck the U.S. economy in the hopes of driving Obama from power.4
Well, enough of that. Suffice to say that the failure of the center has strengthened the extremes, and encouraged the notion that “truth” resides there. The more “passionate” you are, regardless of substance, the more valid. You can read either R.R. or myself on the fine points.
R.R. has something more satisfying to say, about which I’ll also carp, mourning the death of “the most significant influence on my intellectual life,” George Lindbeck (this article is my introduction to both men). Lindbeck was a Lutheran, who taught at Yale Divinity School and, according to Wikipedia, is one of the founders of “postliberal theology”, whatever that is. Wikipedia’s writeup highlights Lindbeck’s involvement in the movement and “explains” that many second-gen postliberal types, including R.R. himself, left the Protestant faith and joined the Catholic Church, quite in the manner (as Wikipedia also notes) of the Oxford “Tractarian Movement” in Victorian England.
R.R. tells us that “[Limbeck] was and remained a Lutheran, and he had only a small degree of sympathy for my conservative political leanings. But I can’t imagine thinking about theology the way I do without his example”:
“Lindbeck taught me this lesson [something about theology, obviously] when lecturing on an early medieval controversy between two monks, Radbertus and Ratramnus. Their dispute concerned whether or not the consecrated bread and wine is Christ’s physical body or his spiritual body. His patient unpacking of this controversy allowed me to understand his metaphor of “grammar.” Both monks wanted to affirm the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the consensus affirmation for almost all Christians, not just in the twelfth century, but in our time as well. However, there is no consensus about what makes things real—a metaphysical question. As a consequence, it’s possible for someone to treat spiritual presence as more real than physical presence. Platonism encourages this way of thinking. The Pythagorean theorem is more “real” than any particular right-angle triangle. Others find this dissatisfying and emphasize the thatness of things, which is to say, their physical presence. This, moreover, is not just a matter of differing philosophical intuitions. The Bible suggests divergent metaphysical affirmations. The opening chapters of Genesis encourage a focus on physical presence, but Jesus’s statement that his kingdom is not of this world points toward the view that the spiritual is more real than things we can see and touch.”
Well, if you’re still with me, I just want to chuckle, amidst all this learnedness, about the line “Both monks wanted to affirm the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the consensus affirmation for almost all Christians, not just in the twelfth century, but in our time as well.” That is so not true. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, is rejected by the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation (both bread and body and wine and blood), the Eastern Orthodox notion of “mystery”, which explicitly and unsurprisingly rejects the Catholic doctrine (in his “twelfth century” reference, R.R. forgets, as so many Catholics do, the very existence of the Eastern Orthodox Church), the Anglican Church’s “whatever”, and the Calvinist rejection of any “magic” at all, part of the basic Protestant thrust to strip the priests of divine authority.5 And today, among the majority of American Protestants—the Evangelicals—the Eucharist plays no role in their faith whatsoever.
Furthermore, R.R. could have chosen, but of course did not, a topic that would prove more obviously divisive, such as the existence of Purgatory, which is rejected by all Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox, or, most divisive of all for Catholics and Lutherans—even more so the infallibility of the Pope when speaking on matters of faith—the question of free will versus predestination. What R.R.’s affection for Lindbeck signifies is the flocking together of all those who fancy metaphysical reveries, which, like the brook, can go on forever.
According to Wikipedia, Lindbeck and his fellow postliberal pals went back to Karl Barth, among others, for inspiration, which makes sense because Barth was one of the early twentieth-century enemies of “Whiggery”, ridiculing the idea that Christ was the first socialist (as Leopold Bloom called him). By my wildly casual reading, Barth took Kant’s categories, designed to secularize Protestant values, and reworked them to justify the metaphysical theology that Kant felt he had disassembled, naturally making it even more rigorous, and “postliberal/antiliberal” as he did so. Progress? Bah! Enlightenment? Nonsense!
Wikipedia informs me that the seminal event in Lindbeck’s career was serving as a guest observer at the famous/infamous “Vatican II” council,6 running from 1962 to 1965, which opened up for Lindbeck, one can be sure, whole new worlds (an infinite number, in fact) of metaphysical speculation. “Why can’t we have this?” he must have exclaimed.
Wikipedia further informs me that Lindbeck and his followers were heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953 and written largely to reject the ideas expressed in the only work that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.7 The notion that one has to master Wittgenstein to get into heaven strikes me as a little strict and just a bit off point. Wittgenstein, though heavily influenced by Christianity personally, certainly never belonged to a church, and moreover always encouraged his students not to pursue a career in philosophy but rather to serve humanity via medicine. The point of philosophy, Wittgenstein thought, was to prove that the study of philosophy led nowhere—though of course that was all he ever thought about.
Wittgenstein’s thought strongly echoes the ideas expressed in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which “explains” why all traditional metaphysics are false—because it applies concepts that effectively describe the finite world to “infinite” realms, where they are out of place. Unfortunately, finite concepts are the only ones we have. Wittgenstein’s favorite philosopher was Artur Schopenhauer, who saw himself as Kant’s disciple. Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, a substantially simpler work than the “thorny” Critique, effectively explains, to my mind, why the theological hairsplitting that so engages both Lindbeck and Reno never ends. And why would they want it to, since they enjoy it so much? Of course, the larger doctrinal divisions between “confessions” are very largely the result of power struggles between entrenched groups, not spontaneous musings, which is why such groups always find ways to disagree with, not to mention burn, one another.
Yeah, this is a long post. Well, you’re here, aren’t you? After bidding farewell to his Lutheran mentor, R.R. throws a few random punches, at modernizing Catholics and free-market know nothings, before coming up with the riff that set me off in the first place, “explaining” how Ronald Reagan engineered morality by cutting taxes, thus encouraging hard work instead of dissipation:
“This was brought home to me decades ago when I was watching John Updike being interviewed on Book TV. He was asked what he thought of his early novels. The celebrated author adopted an amused look and allowed that they were to some degree dated. He recounted a recent trip to an elite university. The students told him that his stories, many of which revolve around afternoon martinis and sexual escapades, ring false. It was not as though life in upscale America had become more buttoned up in the interval between the publication of Rabbit, Run (1960) and their adolescent years in the 1990s. Rather, they told Updike, no adults were home in the early evenings, and their parents were too tired to throw the sorts of cocktail parties that provide the occasions for the alcohol-fueled transgressions that figure prominently in Updike’s fiction. As Updike told the interviewer, he had to inform these hard-charging, high-achieving kids that upper-middle-class grown-ups didn’t work so hard in the 1950s. People had more time on their hands.”
I could point out—and I will—that Rabbit, Run was not about upper-middle-class grown-ups. “Rabbit”, saddled with the ludicrously “loaded” last name of “Angstrom”,8 is a former high-school jock who sells a kitchen “gadget” called the “MagiPeeler” for a living. Updike wrote quite consciously, and conscientiously, about the middle class. Couples, his raunchy blockbuster, which came out in 1968, had more of a mixed group—everyone from a “contractor” to a nuclear physicist, but I think we’re hardly in Don Draper territory.9
More importantly, if we look at the actual data, instead of a novelist’s musings, we find, well, a mixed bag. According to *Measuring Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Decades, published in 2006 by Mark Aguiar and Eric Hurst for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, hours worked by individuals with more than a high school degree declined from 1965 to 2003, from 52 to 43 hours per week. Another study, The Expanding Workweek? Understanding Trends in Long Work Hours Among U.S. Men, 1979-2004, by Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano for the National Bureau Of Economic Research, did find an increase, but dated the origin from 1970, 12 long years before Ronnie’s big cuts took effect.
Most importantly of all, wasn’t there a fair amount of hanky-panky going on in the eighties and nineties, alcohol-fueled or no? How about Donald Trump, hangin’ in Studio 54, aka “Cocaine Alley”, watching supermodels bangin’ n’ snortin’ in public? And what about soon to be chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors Larry Kudlow, who blew up his Wall Street career and his marriage via the White Lady back in 1995? And how about Wall Street “Wolf” Jordan Belfort, whose lifestyle was even more obscene than the hours he worked? Seems like this postliberal theology stuff might not be all it’s cracked to be. In fact, I wonder what either Barth or Wittgenstein might think of R.R.’s “logic”.
Afterwords
R.R.’s affectionate tribute to his mentor Lindberg suggests that genial companionship is more highly valued than mere “ideas”. Although both men surely took all their high-flying metaphysics seriously—believed they were necessary for salvation, which is pretty important after all—one can bet that neither ever tried to “convert” the other. How gauche can you be? If he could have done so, would Ross have journeyed to Lindberg’s deathbed, priest in tow, to save his friend’s soul? I think not. But wasn’t it his Christian duty to do so? Just sayin’.
- Yeah, the gals don’t want to spend their money on birth control. But health care is “compensation”. Could the Little Sisters forbid their employees from using their wages to buy birth control pills? Then why should the employees be denied the opportunity to select a health care plan that offered them for “free”? ↩︎
- The federal bailout was necessary, but in the past when the International Monetary Fund bailed out “bad” nations like South Korea they were required to “reform”. Far from requiring Wall Street to “reform”, the Obama Administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, rewarded them. Furthermore, while Wall Street bankers drank their own Kool-Aid during the Boom (making the same investments they advised their clients to make), when things were falling apart there was a great deal of criminal deceit, as might be expected. The Obama Administration swept this under the rug. “Do you want us to put everyone in jail?” ↩︎
- The Bush Administration, of course, could hardly abandon its “Mission Accomplished” swagger without looking like losers. The possibility that the Obama Administration would pursue a policy of military withdrawal was destroyed by the rise of ISIS and Putin’s seizure of the Crimea. It is “arguable” (I know it is, because I’ve done it a lot) that Hillary Clinton’s aggressively anti-Russian policy in Eastern Europe, and her general contempt for Russian “interests”, led directly to the Ukrainian crisis that precipitated Putin’s decision to invade land that had been part of Russia for several centuries. ↩︎
- After 9/11, the Democrats accepted the need for national unity and led President Bush set the national agenda, which he did with a clear eye towards partisan advantage. Under Obama, the Republicans furiously resisted every presidential proposal and were determined to undermine every possibility of economic recovery, because Obama. ↩︎
- Voltaire, that shallow, shallow fellow, put it more succinctly: “The Catholics say they eat God, and no bread. The Lutherans say they eat God and bread. And the Calvinists say they eat bread and no God.” Luther invented the “theory” of consubstantiation because he had to be different from the Catholic Church, yet, having one foot still in the Catholic Church, couldn’t go “full Calvin”. Luther’s affection for the “traditional” Eucharist is “interesting” because he stripped away all other elements of priestly “magic” (holy relics, extreme unction, etc.). ↩︎
- As Ross Douthat shrewdly observed, Vatican II was largely intended to make the Catholic faith palatable to the American establishment, which, the Vatican shrewdly reckoned, was the only force that could save them from communism. Among other things, Vatican II abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the “Index of Prohibited Books”, which had been updated as recently as 1948 and embarrassingly included such classics as Galileo (of course), Montesquieu (the “celebrated Montesquieu”, as the Founding Fathers always called him), and “even” Blaise Pascal (I guess for making fun of the Jesuits and for not renouncing the evil Cornelius Jansen). ↩︎
- It’s a little shocking that Word can’t spell “tractatus”. I’ll bet that Bill Gates has read Wittgenstein. ↩︎
- You can learn all about Angstroms here. It’s possible, I guess, that Updike met someone named “Angstrom” (it’s a Scandinavian surname as well as a unit of measurement equal to one ten-billionth of a meter) and therefore felt entitled to use it. ↩︎
- I wrote an “homage” of sorts to Updike in my little book Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike, though I doubt if he would appreciate “The Apotheosis of John Updike: A Modern Triptych”, which “he” narrates in the first person. ↩︎
