‘Deadly sins’ of left and right

Two articles that came out earlier today in American Compass that are deliberately paired off with each other, one on either side of the political divide, attempt to explore the ‘deadly sins’ of the left and the right. The first article, written by Ruy Teixeira, purports to explore the five deadly sins of the American left: idpol, retro-socialism, catastrophism, growth-phobia and techno-pessimism. And the second article, written by Henry Olson, explores the three deadly sins of the American right: market fundamentalism, snobbery and hubris. Both of these articles are well-intentioned attempts at introspection and self-examination of certain political mythologies and forms of inertia that have accumulated largely through the ‘bubble’ effect; and I appreciate them both for attempting to concentrate and explore the blindnesses, weaknesses and self-indulgences inherent in the political lifeworlds that most Americans now inhabit.

However, I would – to extend the metaphor slightly – like to play devil’s advocate to each. When it comes to discussions of ‘sin’ what we are really discussing is a moral anthropology and the relationship of man to the divine, and as such these questions are fundamentally religious in character. I would therefore like to think I am approaching these from a point of view that is faithfully Orthodox Christian in accordance with what is to date still the most trenchant and insightful document articulating the political and social values of the Church, though ultimately I must leave that to my confessor and to the hierarchs of my Church to judge.

Regarding the first article, by Teixeira. I agree with some of its central tenets. Firstly, I agree with Mr Teixeira that the American left suffers intensely from its fixation on identity politics, which despite the rhetoric of ‘intersectionality’ actually only serve to fracture the body politic into various grievance groups, and cast all social problems through a lens of oppression. I also agree that the left has allowed itself to be coopted by an elite politics which hides, underneath a ‘green’ veneer, a thoroughly nasty and anti-human Malthusian streak (of which I’ve been consistently critical these past eight years), and which tends to see poor people as a dead-weight problem rather than equal agents and partners in the political process. Insofar as he shares these points with the ‘realist left’, I tend to agree with him.

However, I would push back on a couple of the assumptions Mr Teixeira makes here. There is one really big one that he gets wrong, and that is the assumption that more is always better.

I am not convinced, frankly, that people actually always do want more. Based on the data, I’m fairly sure that’s not actually the case. The data consistently show, in fact (the linked CNBC story being only one example in a genre of œconomic studies that has been going on since the early 2010s), that up to a certain point, more material abundance does correlate with human happiness and satisfaction. Actually, that point is right around the average purchasing power parity in most modern Western developed nations, $75,000. However, past that point, having more material wealth doesn't actually make us happier even though we don’t stop trying to accumulate it. It’s the law of diminishing returns. With apologies to Daft Punk, there comes a point where harder better faster stronger just doesn’t get people off, and mo’ stuff actually begins to correlate with mo’ worries.

The irony is not lost on me that Teixeira is using the language of ‘sin’ here, because he is ignoring a critical dimension of the left’s failure to engage. The techno-enthusiasts and the growth-philes ignore these studies and these bodies of data at their own peril, because they are prescribing the wrong medicine – that of more material prosperity – for what is ultimately a hunger of the spirit. Saint John of Patmos put it correctly in his first Epistle: the problem with the ‘lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life’ is that it the stuff of the world that these desires want to find satiety in, is all ‘passing away, along with its desires’. Even though we cannot do without the material – Christ never condemned the material; He came in a material Body and by that Body gave us a material means of salvation – we look for more happiness in more material in vain. And we literally name as deadly passions – as sins – the sorts of behaviour Teixeira wants to encourage: lust, gluttony, avarice. Here is what the Russian Orthodox Church says about this:

The Church is not someone who defines the rights to property. However, the material side of human life is not outside her field of vision. While calling to seek first «the kingdom of God and his righteousness», the Church does not forget about people’s the need for «daily bread» and believes that every one should have resources sufficient for life in dignity. At the same time, the Church warns against the extreme attraction to wealth, denouncing those who are carried away by «cares and riches and pleasures of this life». The Church in her attitude to property does not ignore the material needs, nor does she praise the opposite extreme, the aspiration for wealth as the ultimate goal and value of life.

And still more emphatically:

Wealth cannot make man happy. The Lord Jesus Christ warns: «Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth». The pursuit of wealth makes a baneful impact on the spiritual condition of a person and can lead him to complete degradation. St. Paul points out that «they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things».

And again, with regard to the human impact on œcology, here is what the Russian Church has to say. Note the relationship between material desire, technological progress, and spiritual loss:

Relationships between anthropology and ecology are revealed with utter clarity in our days when the world is experiencing two concurrent crises: spiritual and ecological. In contemporary society, man often loses the awareness of life as a gift of God and sometimes the very meaning of life, reducing it sometimes to the physical being alone. With this attitude to life, nature around him is no longer perceived as home and all the more so as temple, becoming only a «habitat». The spiritually degrading personality leads nature to degradation as well, for it is unable to make a transforming impact on the world. The colossal technological resources cannot help humanity blinded by sin, for, being indifferent to the meaning, mystery and wonder of life, they cannot be really beneficial and sometimes become even detrimental. In a spiritually disorientated man, the technological power would beget utopic reliance on the boundless resources of the human mind and the power of progress.

One of the first unambiguously-left politicians to have foreseen the problem of too much prosperity, and how this prosperity should be dealt with and distributed, was General Secretary Hu Jintao, when he made a suspiciously Confucian (specifically, the Odes) call for a xiaokang shehui 小康社会, or a ‘moderately prosperous society’. It’s been a practical goal of the Chinese left since 2002 to aim for a society where a certain basic standard of living is met but not exceeded; and Xi Jinping has included this aim specifically in his ‘Four Comprehensives’ policy. Note that Chinese policy has not been anti-growth per se, and certainly not anti-technology per se. But according to their own internal documents they are still only willing to pursue growth up to a certain point and are committed to a goal of ultimately tapering off.

So here is where I would say that Teixeira needs to reevaluate. He accuses the left of something like ingratitude when he comes to the topic of technology. I think that’s fair. The left does need to evince a certain degree of gratitude for the frontiers in medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, communications and so on that have been pushed by technological innovation. But the attitude of ‘I want more’ runs thoroughly counter to this position of gratitude. Indeed, what happens when the ‘more’ that people want is inevitably unable to be satisfied by greater material wealth? If ‘more is better’, and ‘more’ even beyond the point of satiety – or even to the point of satiety – is all that the left really wants, then Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were completely right to reject it. And American voters will be right to reject it.

~~~

Coming to the second article, on the sins of American right, by Henry Olson… this article strikes me as a trifle strange on account of its fixation on the figure of Reagan. More on that later, though. The fact that Olson is straight-up willing to criticise these streaks in the Republican Party – not just the market fundamentalism but also white Protestant snobbery and the tendency to idolise the businessman and the pious patriarch – is truly laudable. What’s more, I don’t really dispute Olson’s diagnoses, though it must be admitted that I approach this topic more from a grounding in the American left than in the American right, and thus have a predisposition to affirm these critiques. Even so, there is a certain Whiggish anthropological falsity even under these needed and praiseworthy correctives, that needs to be addressed – and so I feel I have to play Devil’s advocate here as well.

Market fundamentalism is indeed a sin, and it is indeed a sin of the Republican Party in general going back to the 1980s. (It’s an intriguing bit of sleight-of-hand Olson uses to elide the fact that Reagan himself did much to foment and popularise within the Republican Party at least the first of these three cardinal partizan sins he discusses, despite a couple of protectionist flourishes Reagan made in his second term.) The Russian people know about market fundamentalism, having had a direct experience with the ‘shock doctrine’ between 1992 and 1998. So it should come as no surprise that the Orthodox Church likewise censures, first, the absolute commitment to private property among people:

According to the teaching of the Church, people receive all the earthly blessings from God who is the One who holds the absolute right to possess them. The Saviour repeatedly points to the relative nature of the right to property in His parables on a vineyard let out to be used, on talents distributed among many and on an estate handed over for temporary management. Expressing the idea inherent to the Church that God is the absolute owner of everything, St. Basil the Great asks: «Tell me, what do you have that is yours? Where from did you take it and bring to life?» The sinful attitude to property manifested in the conscious rejection of this spiritual principle generates division and alienation among people.

And second, that the Russian Orthodox Church condemns the idea that ‘market relations’ should be the sole or even primary consideration in the distribution of goods like healthcare:

Without giving preference to any organisational model of medical aid, the Church believes that this aid should be maximum effective and accessible to all members of society, regardless of their financial means and social status, also in the situation of limited medical resources. To make the distribution of these resources truly equitable, the criterion of «vital needs» should prevail over that of «market relations».

I likewise agree with Olson that snobbery and hubris – these two appear to be synonymous with the passions of vainglory and pride – are common failings on the political right, though they are far from exclusive to the right. Olson seems to be angling after a particular anthropology or genealogy of the American right, with his observations of these sins: a genealogy which is rooted in its class origins and in its religious origins. I’m a trifle uncomfortable with this genealogical account of conservative sins for, I guess we can call them ‘Quakerdox’ reasons (and, yes, I’m aware of the irony), but fine, we may take it as read.

Olson accuses the Republicans of entertaining, too often, a kind of white and Protestant intégrisme, which elevates the (private, devotional, pietistic) religious concerns of the holders of power over considerations of policy – that theological failings are tantamount to political failings. I kind of get this complaint, and I share it. But he’s treading out on some very thin anthropological ice. The common roots of sæcular law and religious law are more deeply entangled than he wants to permit, and the common roots of morality and religious devotion as well:

Historically, both religious and secular laws originate from the same source. Moreover, for a long time they only represented two sides of one legal field. This idea of law is also characteristic of the Old Testament.

The Lord Jesus Christ, in calling those faithful to Him to the Kingdom that is not of this world, separated the Church as His body from the world lying in evil. In Christianity, the internal law of the Church is free from the spiritually-fallen state of the world and is even opposed to it. This opposition, however, is not the violation but the fulfilment of the law of the divine Truth in its fullness, which humanity repudiated in the fall. Comparing the Old Testament norms with that of the Gospel, the Lord in His Sermon on the Mount calls people to seek the full identity of life with the absolute divine law, that is to deification: «Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect».

At the same time, though, the law is written upon all human hearts; the law is made for all and all are bound to it, regardless of what religious beliefs they hold. There is a certain basic level of human dignity which cannot be reduced to mere religious belonging. Again, the Russian Orthodox Church on the subject:

Among the oldest monuments of the written language are numerous collections of homilies and statutes. Undoubtedly, they go back to the even earlier, pre-alphabet, existence of humanity, since «the work of the law» is written by God in human hearts. Law has been there in the human society from times immemorial. The first rules were given to man as far back as the paradise time. After the fall, which is violation by man of the divine law, law becomes a boundary and trespassing against it threatens the destruction of both the human personality and human community.

The law contains a certain minimum of moral standards compulsory for all members of society. The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell. The fundamental principle of law is: «do not do to others what you would not want to be done to yourself».

So I would go along with Olson happily, as long as what he is critiquing is a certain vainglorious image of homo conservativus, a certain false idol of the self which American conservatives are sometimes wont to lug around with them: an idol of the self in which sentimentality and private devotion (or worse yet, self-interest masquerading as piety!) substitute themselves for actual works of mercy. Merely going through the performative motions of religiosity is no substitute whatsoever for actual works of kindness and justice, true mortification of the will, true acts of courage. He and I can agree all day long on that count. As Khomyakov put it:

He who loved truth and righteousness and defended the weak against the strong, who fought against corruption, tortures and slavery, is a Christian, if only to some extent; he who did his best to improve the life of the workers and to brighten the wretched lot of the classes oppressed by poverty whom we cannot as yet make quite happy, is a Christian, if only in part.

But Olson only partially frees himself from the objections to such idolatry, because of the abject and even idolatrous hero-worship of Ronald Reagan which suffuses his article. Olson engages in the sæcular canonisation of a figure who (again, despite some protectionist flourishes he made as California governor and in his second term as president) possibly did more than any other to retrench the ideas of market fundamentalism on the American right, in a way that had not held sway since Calvin Coolidge. In an article which is meant to explore the sins of the American right, such an emphasis – at best – lacks good taste. At worst, it seems to be an admission of cluelessness with regard to how the American right arrived in its current plight.

Again, I don’t want to come down too hard on either of these authors. In many ways, they are doing better than I am: they are engaged in the hard and necessary work of metanoia on behalf of their respective political communities; and allowances are certainly to be made for excesses of overcorrection, or for lacunæ in the rearward view so dearly held. And I’m sure that there are such lacunæ and such overcorrections in my own idiosyncratic syncretic political views, which are themselves grown out of the crooked timber of sexual fantasies and utopian dreaming, which I have yet to address. I applaud the bravery of these two authors for the conversation they have begun.

EDIT: I cannot believe I posted something about the deadly sins without also referencing Maiden’s Seventh Son album. Bad hesher! Bad! Ahem. At any rate, here to make up for it is ‘Can I Play with Madness’:

Ideological history: the Fourth International take on 1619

An early colonial Quaker meeting

Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North over at the World Socialist Web Site have a rebuttal to the New York Times’s 1619 Project that is interesting and infuriating in nearly equal measure. I suppose that is to be expected from Trotskyists. But all the same there’s enough that’s substantially correct about their critique that it’s worth dwelling on at some length.

First of all, I have to admit that I agree with the overall general thrust of the Fourth International’s critique of 1619. Given my antiracist positions, as well as my High Tory scepticism of the American project generally, a casual blog reader might be tempted to conclude that my sympathies are firmly on the side of the Times in this case. That would be incorrect.

Racism is indeed an evil. Racism is indeed an evil that is deeply enmeshed in American society going back to colonial times. However, I have also always held that racism is historically circumscribed and that concrete things can be done to combat it. Useless white liberal self-flagellation on the op-ed pages of the Times is not one of them. Community policing reforms, criminal justice reform, instituting rent controls, providing equitable funding and staffing for public schools, instituting Medicare for All, ending informal population-control policies in black neighbourhoods, ending private for-profit prisons, ending redlining and predatory credit practices by both banks and payday institutions, ending the damn Forever War that runs on and destroys primarily black and poor bodies: these largely œconomic fixes would go a long way toward eliminating the most intolerable forms of racism in American society. In short, ending capitalism would also end the great bulk of the race-based misery of black America.

I agree wholeheartedly with Niemuth, Mackaman and North insofar as they hold to the limited argument against the 1619 Project and its central conceit. It is indeed not ‘in the DNA’ of America or Americans to hate each other based on the colour of their skin – either literally or figuratively. The biological and sociological determinism of the worldview behind the 1619 Project is ahistorical and, indeed, morally noxious – for the very reasons they describe.

But the problems begin to crop up very quickly when the authors for the Fourth International stray from this narrow critique into a broader take on world history, and their sweeping and reductive takes on ‘the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world’. For one thing, classical slavery and modern chattel slavery were and are very different institutions, underpinned by very different material conditions. It’s actually something of a travesty, that authors proclaiming themselves to be Marxist overlook this. Any Marxist worth his salt should have a ready materialist explanation for the differences between classical and early modern slavery, because – as it happens – there is one.

In Europe itself, the two institutions – the slavery of Antiquity, and the chattel slavery of the Age of Exploration – were separated by a good half millennium of gradual abolition and humane developments in law, like those undertaken by Adamnán of Iona in the British Isles and by Eike von Repgow on the Continent. This gradual abolition happened in large part because of the building reliance of the agrarian œconomies of the late-antique barbarian kingdoms on arable land and its produce rather than on labour. This œconomic structure, which was still largely in place on the continent during the capitalist revolution, was the source of a great deal of the early resistance to the new institution of modern chattel slavery, and made up a significant element of the abolition movement going forward. This is something I have laid great stress on over the course of my writing on this blog. The old feudal resistance to the new money-based, urban and mercantile œconomy provided an early basis for the proletarian resistance that was as yet in its germinal stage.

This article series takes aim at a distorted and blinkered view of the social history of the Americas, which obliterates the contributions – as the authors purport to see it – of the nascent proletarian movement in the Northern United States in combatting both chattel slavery and Jim Crow, as well as a host of other forms of œconomic and social exploitation. And that is good and right and just. Every one of their critiques of Hannah-Jones and her Project is fully deserved. But it’s more than a bit infuriating to see the authors themselves fall into the same trap when it comes to the early history of the movement for abolition.

Tracing abolitionism as a movement back only to Wilberforce – as Niemuth, Mackaman and North do – is in fact its own form of erasure. For the same reasons that it is dishonest to omit, elide or downplay the rôle of the Northern white working class in abolitionism, so too it’s dishonest to do the same for the religious predecessors of the movement. Omitting the religious convictions of the Society of Friends or the anti-slavery activism of James Oglethorpe, or the later political syncretism of Richard Oastler (which actually got results for the working-class in Britain), from the story of abolition is every bit as great an act of distortion and violence to historical truth. Why? Because it shows the actual instance of a Marxist dialectical synthesis between the advocates of ‘feudal’ reaction and the advocates of anti-slavery radicalism, in directing a humane change in œconomic relations.

Now, I do understand that my gentle readers are likely to think, after reading all this, that the foregoing is just Cooper on one of his genealogical or arcane political hobbyhorses. And you might be right to think so to some degree. But getting the history right is something for modern leftists to be concerned with, precisely because there is simply no critical mass or critical constituency for any sort of ‘pure’ leftism in the United States. And that constituency is very unlikely to be built without some kind of populist rapprochement.

It’s telling that the closest that the working class has ever come to achieving meaningful degrees of political power in the United States was the ultimately-failed populist uprising of the 1880s and 1890s – and that was born precisely out of a fruitful alliance between urban workers who wanted to expand public ownership of infrastructure, and rural farmers who wanted to reduce their debt burden. It’s also telling in a negative way: even the most liberal elements of the professional class have always put their own interests first, and never those of the working class. It’s worth pointing out that there is considerable discontent nowadays among the very people who identify as conservative or independent, against the neoliberal consensus the authors justly rail against. A lot of that discontent is voiced in opportunistic or cynical ways, but it’s there and it’s genuine. If the left wants to gain power, it has to work with this discontent rather than in isolation from it.

I agree with the authors of the critique that history is not a morality play. Therefore, there is nothing to be gained by rendering one side of that history idealistically ‘pure’, any more than by rendering it racially ‘pure’. We only impoverish our own historical understanding when we airbrush out of our history the religious Dissenters, the Royalists, the Nonjurors and such who prepared the fields for abolitionism, built up much of the œconomic infrastructure which made abolition possible, and even tended the first fruits of its harvest. Even though, to a large degree, they were either neutral or on the ‘losing side’ of the American Revolution.

The Incarnational conviction of FD Maurice

The English Victorian clergyman John Frederick Denison Maurice, in whose writings I had a keen (but unfortunately all-too-shallow) interest during and after college, is celebrated today in the Anglican Communion. A man who is primarily remembered for his social activism today, Maurice did indeed appeal to me – a young leftist of a philosophical bent – on the Social Gospel level. But coming as I do from a Mennonite background and having evinced in the years after college a great interest in my Quaker family roots, it was more Maurice’s interest in (and disputes with) Quakerism that drew me his way – and, not coincidentally, in the direction of High Church Anglo-Catholicism.

Frederick Denison Maurice did not start off in the Church of England. His father was a minister, rather, in the Unitarian Church in Gloucester, and held to some fairly strong opinions against not only the English Church but also against its educational institutions at Oxford and Cambridge. Death in the family caused a fracture. His mother and his siblings eventually abandoned Unitarianism for various forms of evangelical Christianity; however, Frederick leaned instead toward the established church (which irked his father deeply). It’s difficult not to see a little bit of teenage rebellion in the fact that Maurice ultimately chose to attend school at Cambridge, even though he would not join the established church during his school-years. He studied law there, apparently did well on his exams, and co-founded a student debate society called the Apostles – but left the school for conscientious reasons. He wrote quite a bit at this time as well; his writings were praised by none other than Coleridge. His teaching, however, was not well-received; he came off in the classroom as standoffish, rigid, remote and humourless. However, for those students who attended carefully to what he was saying, he proved to be a deep well of knowledge.

He eventually did join the established church – just before he met (and married three months later) a young woman named Anna Barton, who bore him two sons. (Anna Maurice died in 1845; and Maurice would eventually remarry Georgiana Hare-Naylor in 1849.) It was at this time that he wrote The Kingdom of Christ, which I remember reading enthusiastically as a youngster in the peace church tradition, and which I found to be a bridge (along with the works of Charles Gore) into a more liturgical tradition that I would come to feel better accorded with my social views and understanding of who Christ is.

That latter question, the question of who Christ is, was the burning and central one for Maurice, who embraced with both arms and all the enthusiasm of the convert the theology of the Incarnation preached in England by Lancelot Andrewes. He was driven by two overriding convictions: by Christ as Incarnate God – as God made flesh; and by the love of God which no barrier, whether legal or metaphysical or conceptual or even physical, could possibly hope to override or thwart. Intriguingly and paradoxically, these same convictions which led him to embrace the most liturgically ‘high’ expression of English Christendom save one, also led him to a profound respect for the distinctly anti-liturgical old-school, radical Quakers: both their spiritual convictions and their political engagements.

Maurice understood the Incarnation, and indeed the Crucifixion, as God Himself standing among (and for) what we would now call the precarious, the non-integrated, the marginalised people of the earth. In his own context and time, understanding this meant embracing the cause of the English working class – which had been uprooted violently from its traditional peasant moorings and forced into the cities – and women, who had been largely excluded from institutions of higher learning. To the second end, Maurice co-founded, with his friend, fellow-clergyman and fellow-novelist Charles Kingsley, Queen’s College for young ladies in 1848; however, Maurice’s increasingly-radical views courted controversy, and he was obliged to dissociate himself from Queen’s College. To the first, the two scholarly churchmen founded the Working Men’s College in London in 1854 (where also taught John Ruskin) for young men of working-class backgrounds.

Maurice’s socialism – a non-violent, Tory, Owenite variety characterised by what Rowan Williams calls ‘benevolent paternalism’ – arose out of a distaste for the entire ethic of competition and disruption that pervaded contemporary capitalism. It was not æsthetic so much as spiritual: again, rooted in that core question of who Christ is, and what sort of community He built around himself. Maurice called himself – significantly, particularly in light of his Friendly sympathies – a ‘Digger’ and, as he wrote in The Kingdom of Christ: ‘The true law of the universe is that man is made to live in community.’ In his view, the same sacramental ties that bind the body of Christ on earth to the kingdom of heaven, also must bind the members of that body of Christ to each other. If those members are at war, or preying upon and exploiting one another, then their membership in the body of Christ is a lie, a fiction which must and can be exposed only through the reality of the Cross. For Maurice (as for certain saintly Orthodox churchmen in Russia who came to similar conclusions), the only proper answer to the cutthroat depredations of capitalism was Christian brotherhood as realised in the Sacraments.

Maurice was both firm and forthright in his defences, both of the working class and of women. A champion of the œconomic demands of the Revolutions of 1848 on the Continent, he attempted to bring the Church of England itself and its teachings to bear as a voice for the exploited and abused labourers. He supported the nascent coöperatives movement in England, particularly among the workers in the industrially-dominant textile industry. Later in life, Maurice sat on a commission responsible for overturning the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, which had legalised prostitution. Rather than arguing (as one might expect) from a position of hectoring Victorian moralism and appeals to modesty and chastity, Maurice instead highlights that the abuses women of the profession suffered at the hands of their legal military ‘clients’, the police and the medical examiners under the ‘legal’ regime of prostitution were as bad if not worse than they would have been otherwise.

Again, all of this activism on Maurice’s part stemmed from a theology which places the Incarnation of Christ in a central rôle. The flesh – however bruised, however starved, however exploited – has been healed and been made holy by the sheer fact that the Most High, the Being beyond being, has become for our sake a common τέκτων, a woodworker with callused hands Who broke bread among the worst and most pitiful of humankind. And more than that: He has been beaten, mocked, scourged, pierced with a spear, made to carry the instrument of His own torture, nailed to it, bled upon it, died upon it. And He lived again. Those who would condemn the ‘materialism’ of the socialists must reckon first with this spiritual conviction which by no means ignores matter. Though (being Orthodox) I am no advocate of ‘branch theory’, the bearers of this conviction, whether they are Orthodox or Catholic or – like Maurice – Anglican, must indeed be read with grave respect and attention by the faithful, if the growing tide of heresy and nihilism is to be effectively resisted.

Speaking of ‘spiritual ethnicity’

Last month, blogger David Russell Mosley over at Letters from the Edge of Elfland on Patheos Catholic channel posted an interesting piece on ‘spiritual ethnicity’, which was prompted by his pondering the results of his genetic genealogy test from Ancestry.com. I enjoyed that piece greatly and want to offer something of a response to it, but before I go any further, I do want to reflect a little on this. The recent craze here for genetic genealogy – a craze I’m by no means immune from, by the way – has already had some intriguing effects on our public discourse. For one thing, it’s unfortunately nabbed Elizabeth Warren by the heel as soon as she got her presidential run off the ground. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, and I want to be sure to do it justice.

By that I mean, I don’t want to make any overly-hasty generalisations on this, because my own family’s experience has been so mixed. My father’s family never cared that much about the patrimony and the family line, for (as I was given to understand it) two reasons. Firstly, because poverty makes that stuff seem unimportant. When you’re living hand-to-mouth, crop to crop, debt burden to debt burden, what your dead great-grandparents did can start to seem a bit irrelevant to your life. Secondly, because living in the South – and living as a poor white person in the South – seems attendant with a particular burden of shame. I have a very deep respect for Grandpa Cooper, and for the sacrifices he had to make in his life in order to place himself. He fought his ghosts of poverty and shame, and he did so in a way that actively made room around him for people like his first wife, his children, and later his second wife – my step-grandmother. But despite that process and its results being something I find unquestionably worth remembering, treasuring and honouring – there was some deliberate, hard forgetting he chose to do as a result. The deep irony in that is not lost on me.

On the other side – my mother’s side, the Doanes – they have always treasured the family tree, even the parts of it that are inconvenient or that cut against the grain of the national mythology. On the other hand, we do have some real people in our family of whom we can be justly proud. My maternal grandfather and grandmother, for instance, both lived full – and what’s more important, good – lives. I remember describing my grandfather, a bit oxymoronically perhaps, but aptly, as ‘actively generous and aggressively peaceable’. And I meant every word. Can it be any wonder that the Doanes find such joy and conviviality in remembering truly good people like Holden and Laura? But it is not merely for these people that the remembrance holds, that’s the beauty of it. The Doane family, and the allied Camp family, are incredibly tight-knit and have immense family gatherings that are always a joy to visit – people come from opposite coasts, greet each other like family, and have a party. When there is happiness, everyone shares it, and the same when there is pain or sorrow: everyone condoles. Remembrance, even of the ‘bad’ times, becomes transfigured into something joyful and life-affirming.

So, how to make sense of this? The ‘Cooper’ and the ‘Doane’ approaches to remembrance are very different, even though both of them have inescapably shaped my own ‘spiritual ethnicity’, for whatever valence you want to attach to either word in that formula. If I’m being honest with myself, I would have to say that the shame-complex aspect that I seem to have inherited from the Cooper side of the line has done more to shape my spiritual trajectory than the New England Methodist conviviality of the Doanes. There’s a Southern Gothic ‘haunting’ in my relationship to God – something reminiscent of Capote, O’Connor or Williams – that I haven’t been able to quite figure out or square away yet. It’s shown up several times in my life, and I don’t think that’s something that I can easily dismiss.

Beyond that, though, my spiritual ‘roots’ lie in a confluence of peace church activism – inherited from my Quaker forebears and impressed further upon me by my Mennonite upbringing; High Church Anglican Tory contrarianism – a gift from college and from the good folks at Saint Stephen’s in Providence, which strangely enough has encouraged and informed my Russophile tendencies; and a certain Eastern European Jewish radicalism – which, in the process of having come to light again, has been strangely amplified and transmuted by my involvement in the Antiochian Church. Each of these stems of my spiritual ‘genetics’ has directed me – the fact that each of these things lies in my background has given indication of the shape which my spiritual path must take. Indication – not dictation.

That’s an important distinction. Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev were very quick to intuit the necessity of not only paying homage to one’s paternity, but actively loving them, to any kind of spiritual self-awareness. Fyodorov went as far as to say that it was our duty as a species to use our knowledge to resurrect our dead forefathers. This is why, in our prayer books, we are encouraged to pray for the health and salvation of our parents every morning. (This is also one of the reasons why I am writing such a lengthy series of hagiographical blog posts on the pre-Schismatic English saints.) But equally important, particularly when we use phrases like ‘spiritual genealogy’, is the necessary theological caution that genetics is not destiny. Even in the very Gospel of Matthew, in which the ancestry of Jesus is presented first and foremost, Saint John the Forerunner says not two chapters later unto the religious authorities: ‘Think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham!’ In the annals of the histories received from the Doanes and pieced together from the Coopers, individual choice as a factor within history appears inescapable, even if the content of those choices was highly constrained by the conditions under which they were made.

In the end, of course, I think David Mosley is right, that ‘more reflection reveals deeper truths’, and that temet nosce is good advice for all and always. But the Church has always needed both the introductory chapters of the Gospel of Matthew and of the Gospel of Luke. The Church needs both the ‘spiritual genetics’ of Christ and His Church (we cannot, after all, do without the Law and the Prophets in our unregenerate state), and the sublimely personal act in history of total obedience to God that marked the Theotokos apart from all of her forebears and set us free, in the radical and philosophical sense understood by the authors of the Greek Scriptures. It does not do merely to say we are sons by blood; we must, like the prodigal son coming to himself, become sons by choice.

Hints to a Catholic republican

Orestes Brownson

Jack Quirk – the editor of Christian Democracy blog at Patheos, who has graciously run a handful of my articles there which can also be found on this blog (here, here and here) – recently issued an interesting challenge to his ‘monarchist’ friends and countrymen. Now, I daren’t arrogate to myself the intimacy to Mr Quirk to call myself his ‘friend’: our interactions have been solely online, though we share many of the same values and core political beliefs. I also don’t know whether I sufficiently qualify anymore as a ‘monarchist’ to be able to respond effectively to Mr Quirk’s challenge. Nevertheless, I feel it may be worth giving a shot.

Firstly, a couple of qualifications – because, after all, I am a monarchist with qualifications, and I feel it’s only right and just to lay all my cards on the table in advance of my argument. My pro-monarchy sentiments and beliefs are – even among as eclectic and counter-cultural a bunch as monarchists tend to be generally – a bit odd, perhaps, because they proceed from three key sources.

1. My Tory loyalism. This loyalism is familial: my spear-side forebear Jacob Cooper was a Tory, and featured on a South Carolina rebel commander’s list of enemies. And distaff-side, the infamous Doan Gang feature prominently. However, this loyalism on both sides is bound up in a certain Pennsylvania Quaker cultural-metapolitical preference for order, stability and communal harmony over the upheavals of revolution. (I kept this preference as an Anglican and continue to keep it as an Orthodox Christian; in neither case do I believe it conflicts with my religious commitments.) In any event, ever since middle school I’ve instinctively taken the side of the loyalists. I continue to regard the motives of the ‘Founding Fathers’ with scepticism and distrust, and have stubbornly refused to countenance the ‘patriotic’ mythology of the American revolution.


2. My ‘Jennifer complex’. I shall explain the term and concept in a later blog post. Suffice it to say that the persistent Anglophilia which has informed my spelling habits and has lent itself to part of this blog’s title, seems to be rooted deep in my psyche. Surprisingly deep, as I discovered this past Lent. I suspect it may have Freudian roots, being bound up with latent but profound attractions to two of my schoolteachers early in my education. But my love of all things British has absolutely shaped my preference for constitutional monarchy as a system of government.


3. The welfare-state connexion. It’s been a paradoxical observation of mine, one that has proven correct as I’ve seen the data. All other things being equal, constitutional monarchies provide more equal outcomes for people on the bottom rungs of the ladder than republics do; the only exceptions I’m aware of are in the post-communist world. I’ve seen several explanations for this, and I’m somewhat agnostic on which one (or mixture) is correct. The traditional feudal power struggle often enlisted the king on the side of the ‘common folk’ against the nobility. The fear of revolution often led monarchies like Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan and the Nordic countries to adopt progressively comprehensive welfare-state measures. And the idea that there is an established order with one acknowledged fellow at the ‘top’ can be said to prevent the bourgeoisie and gentry social climbers from becoming too heartless and ruthless in their pursuit of worldly gain. In any event, the correlation between a decently-egalitarian social order and the presence of a monarch exists, and it is strong.

I don’t list all of the above in order to weaken or second-guess my own argument; merely to establish what kind of (flawed, fallible, limited) person is making it. I do not claim to speak for all monarchists, and still less for monarchism as an ideology. I speak for myself alone, and for a certain position of broadly ‘left’-ish constitutional monarchism which I feel is best reflected in the robust social politics of Clement Attlee and, to a lesser extent, Harold Macmillan.

Enough navel-gazing for now? Onward, ho, then:

Mr Quirk begins in a similar spirit of self-deprecation, and assumes that his inability to compass the appeal of monarchism to people like myself is owing to some failure of his own imagination or intellect. I’m given to suspect a certain degree of false modesty here. Mr Quirk has proven able to conjure and array a number of substantial arguments in defence of Christian democracy – arguments which I have found convincing myself on occasion. Still, let’s do Mr Quirk the only reasonable and kind thing and credit his sincerity. He posits several models of monarchy, and enlists the help of several examples.

His first model, in answer to the sort of monarchist who appeals to the glories of a hazy European past, entails the historical basis of monarchy in its feudal political-œconomic moorings, with the first monarch in a succession being a successful warlord who rewards his generals with land and wealth and power. Quite understandably – and, in my opinion, rightly – he objects to living under a timocratic régime so dominated by militarism and lust for honours. However, as he himself acknowledges, most monarchists (myself included) are not satisfied by this objection, which is overly specific. The history of the United Kingdom itself has witnessed several changes in dynastic power – some peaceful and some less so – but it’s far from clear that monarchical changes are any bloodier or more militaristic than republican ones. Ask around Ireland, for example, to see how well Great Britain’s only republican ruler, Oliver Cromwell, is regarded. And for a counterexample: the Stuarts acceeded to the English monarchy twice, both times in a spirit of relative peace.

As to Mr Quirk’s next suggestion, that ‘monarchy’ and ‘socialism’ are both alike vague and relatively open terms – this I agree with, gleefully and without hesitation. Indeed, it is only under just such openness that I can be considered either a monarchist or a socialist, riven as my political views are with antinomy, paradox and irony. I’m indeed thankful that monarchism and socialism are both broad enough tents to admit someone like me, whose theopolitics are so recherché. It’s only when he proceeds to his following assumptions that I begin to dissent.

He charges monarchists, by implication, with being materialists and with being Pelagians. I confess to not being too fussed by the first charge, if only for the reason that I’ve made the same charge myself against certain of my fellow monarchists. This was a charge levelled both by Solovyov, and in a more indirect form by Tolkien himself – who took pains in his description of Gondor under the Stewards to attack those forms of ‘traditionalism’ which attach themselves to the dead husks of outward form. But Mr Quirk’s implied charge that monarchists are closet Pelagians is just… bizarre.

After all, it isn’t as though monarchists either historically or in the present day have made a point of denying original sin in its effects: that seems to be more a fabrication which Milton sought to attach to his monarchist opponents in his republican poetic symbolism. I think – and perhaps this may be wishful thinking in some cases – monarchists are clear-eyed enough to avoid the vulgar and stupid mistake of thinking human beings who happen to wear crowns to be morally infallible, or not in need of political constraint. Tradition itself may act as a brake on runaway princely ambitions in the form of an unwritten constitution. (In a modern political climate such as ours, it seems a trifle unreasonable to hope that symphonía can provide such a brake as it did for Emperor Saint Constantine and his successors. But that should be the hope and the model striven after.)

Now, the real question: does the form of the state matter when deciding on policy? Mr Quirk answers a definitive and emphatic ‘no’ from the standpoint of Catholic social teaching, but I confess I find myself somewhat sceptical. At the risk of sounding like a Herderian run amok: the state itself is all form, and all policies must have a formal aspect. To give one example: would a good Christian democrat see fit to advocate policy within the context of a fascist dictatorship? (Historical experience would say no.) There are certain totalitarian formal contexts within which Christian democratic policies and advocacy make no sense, and which a Christian democrat is obligated to oppose. I think and hope Mr Quirk recognises that constitutional monarchy of the sort we had as colonies of Britain, and which the British government still has, is not one of these totalitarian forms.

To press the point a bit further: what is it that makes the American Constitution so sacrosanct that changing it becomes unimaginable to a Catholic? The Constitution in its original form permitted and endorsed slavery. It is only with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that slavery was formally done away with; a change that came far earlier and far easier, it should be noted, to the subjects of the British Crown. Are we to believe that good American Catholics in the mid-1800’s would not have been justified in advocating for abolition, on the grounds that it required a formal change to the constitution of the American state? Speaking as an Orthodox Christian with a heavy hereditary Quaker streak, such a distinction between constitutional ‘form’ and policy ‘substance’ seems artificial and ethically specious particularly in this case. Truly, no less great an American Catholic apologist than Orestes Brownson – himself no particular fan of monarchy – would sharply beg to differ with it.

With regard to the more pragmatic question Mr Quirk raises, of whether or not the Constitution of the United States actually should be changed, I do agree with his ultimate point – conditionally. It does precious little good to advocate for a monarchical change to the Constitution when the people and the culture themselves don’t favour it. In such a context, Mr Quirk is right to hint that such a constitutional proposal would ‘get in the way’ of advocating for more humane policies. On the other hand, rejecting as I do both the formal state-policy distinction and the essentialist assumption of cultural immutability, in an ultimate long-term sense I can’t help but entertain hope for the idea of a constitutional monarchy here. Particularly if constitutional monarchies are indeed better for the downtrodden than republics are.

Prison or process?

HAH ŒP Bartholomew of Constantinople

Earlier this year I had the disorienting experience of reading a book by an author I deeply admire, which left me feeling rather cold. The Divine and the Human, by Nikolai Berdyaev, was the first book of his that I failed to be impressed by. Now, this was just after having read a selection from the Orations by Saint Gregory the Theologian. Saint Gregory is a tough act to follow, and perhaps any comparison I could possibly make between the two would be grossly unfair to Berdyaev. Even so, the nature of what I was thinking about in the wake of reading Saint Gregory led me to see some of the profound blind spots in Berdyaev’s work.

I do not say any of the following, by the way, to denigrate Berdyaev as a thinker. The man’s philosophical work is still immensely valuable, and was, as I have said numerous times on this blog, one of the key influences in my turn toward Orthodoxy. His deep and compassionate Christian personalism and his respect for the human creative impulse sparked life and fire in my soul, even as I was intellectually and spiritually floundering in my after-college years. Playing a key rôle in my political formation were his deep suspicions of the great Enlightenment divorce of material and spiritual questions, and his preferences for both left-anarchism (à la Kropotkin, among others) and traditionalist conservatism (à la Leont’ev and Bloy). The fortitude and fearlessness with which he faced and fought the most fundamental dehumanisations of the harrowing early 20^th century, from chemical warfare to concentration camps to capitalism, were a blazing inspiration. So it is not with ease or with lightness that I make the following assessments – some of them quite hard – of The Divine and the Human.

Berdyaev has a strong and visceral dislike of those religious traditions which place too great an emphasis on the sacral importance of nature. He sees such ‘magic’, such ‘animism’, as being driven by a spirit of ‘necessity’ opposed to the Jewish-Christian-Islamic spirit of creative freedom. In such nature-worship he finds the kernels of sadism, of apologetics for naked power, the beginnings of totalitarian logic. Normally, I would find that this parallels the Khomyakovian distinction between iranstvo (the ‘Iranian’ civilisational principle, the principle of fire and sunlight and the spontaneous poetic spoken word) and kushitstvo (the ‘Kushite’ civilisational principle of divisibility and earth-totemism and despotic statuary). In the human world and the life of the mind, there is a strong and living kernel of truth in this distinction. But applied here, to a realm touching on the physical and material world rather than merely the intellectual one, it strikes me as ‘off-key’.

I understand Berdyaev’s point, which concerns human creative freedom in the face of the ‘given’ and ‘constraint’. He sees human freedom at work in history as over-against nature; and that is where he looks for the work of the Divine. But even that formulation nonetheless relies on a quasi-Cartesian intellectual foundation that degrades, howbeit ever so slightly, the mystery and the scandal of the Incarnation as the Greeks would have understood it. To be fair to Berdyaev, I think he understands at least in part the paucity of his own position. Though he teeters on the edge of a kind of misarchism he never quite falls into it. He falls back, rather frustratingly, upon an emotivist point to back away from the Gnostic precipice he’s edged himself onto. He will not accept a God whose salvific work cannot ultimately extend to his cat.

Saint Gregory, on the other hand, beholds nature and speaks thereof from a position of awe, from whence the only response could be, not intellectual speculation and mental division, but poetry. The song of the Divine. What Madeleine L’Engle would call ‘the Old Music’. When Saint Gregory the Theologian writes in his Orations of nature, of the seas and the mountains, of the birds and the fish, of the grass and the stars, he sees it all as transparent, illumined, pregnant with the grace of God, breathing with the spirit and personality of Christ. In the wake of such meditations it struck me as profoundly ungrateful, that Berdyaev could look at the same nature as Saint Gregory, and see in it something akin to a prison.

Here, oddly enough, I find the voice of my father speaking to me. Though I wonder if he would use this precise term, Dr Reid Cooper, the engineer and gæologist, beholds nature with the same kind of reverence that Saint Gregory does. He observes the natural order, the cosmos: from systems like anthills and cities to the patterns of earthquakes and the spread of the galaxies. What he sees in them are not constraints that preclude creativity. What he sees instead are a set of boundary conditions that enable all the diverse and spectacular structures and systems we observe in the cosmos to flourish.

On the earth which he studies, he sees an overabundance of energy, an outpouring of the sun’s radiance, being channelled and consumed within and through those boundary conditions. We – the living beings in the earth’s biosphere – receive only the most infinitesimal fraction of that star’s output, and that at a modest level. And yet even that modest level of energy, that ‘constraint’, sustains every single thing that all us living beings breathe and eat and do. The universe is constantly pouring itself out, in outrageous overabundance, for our sustenance. (The Greek term is kenōsis; it connotes precisely the same thing.) For him, there has never been a conflict between religion and science, because even though scientific method is grounded in certain operational assumptions about the created order which are necessarily material, his discipline itself points to a cosmic reality which is sustained by grace, which is grace. As well as for Gregory, for my father – though again, he might not use this term for it – the cosmic order not only reflects but expresses the personality of Christ.

Though for very obvious reasons I have a strong personal bias in the matter, I feel my dad draws far nearer to the truth on this question than Berdyaev does.

One of the benefits of my liberal peace-church and Anglican religious upbringing is that it embraced a practice and ethic of care for the environment. Thankfully, one of the ‘perks’ of my embrace of Eastern Orthodoxy – unbeknownst to me when I was chrismated – was that it expresses this same ethic of care in a visceral, physical way. I’ve spoken before of the Blessing of the Waters on the feast of Theophany, and how it consecrates and treats as sacred not only the waters used in the Liturgy, but all water. All water becomes holy water. All of nature is transparent to Christ, and as such is holy and to be treated with reverence. The holiness of œcology and the need for an ascetic ‘curb’ on our consumer demands on that œcology, is a topic on which as liberal a Greek as His All-Holiness Œcumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, and as conservative a Russian as Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, can find themselves in perfect agreement.

On the other hand, the most trenchant religious voices in the West on the topic of œcology – those who stand beside and inform the work of Bill McKibben, for instance – are Dr John Cobb, Jr and Dr Herman Daly. The latter is a disciple of the Romanian œconomist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the British Quaker religious philosopher Kenneth Boulding; while the former is a student of the ‘process theology’ developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. Hartshorne, fascinatingly, also cites Nikolai Berdyaev with deep respect and approval in his own writings, and I’m very eager to understand precisely what insights Hartshorne recovers from Berdyaev and how he uses those insights. This is clearly a stream of modern religious philosophy that would be worthwhile to engage.

What the heck is an ‘Anglo-Orthodox’, anyway?

Given that yesterday was the day of the translation of the relics of Saint-King Éadweard the Martyr, it is probably high time to address the single most often-repeated question I get, on this blog and on Facebook. It’s some variant of the following: ‘What exactly do you mean by “Anglo-Orthodox”?’ As something of a public service announcement, then: allow me to attempt to answer that briefly, by examining the two elements in reverse order.

1. Orthodox: ‘of right belief’. I am a member of the Body of Christ. That is to say, the continuous, organic community of single faith, united by conciliar and brotherly love, tracing itself back in an unbroken line to the Apostles of Christ, which is made up by those four of the five ancient Patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem) who have held the ancient teachings intact, the five later Patriarchates (Russia, Georgia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria) and the five (or six, sort of) autocephalous Churches who dwell in unity with them. I confess entirely and without reserve the dogmas concerning the personality of Christ that have been established by the seven Œcumenical Councils. I take as my own the Symbol of Faith that was proclaimed at Nicæa and Constantinople, and which is held in common by all Orthodox Christians.
   
   
2. Anglo: ‘a person of English ancestry’. Which I am, in addition to the odd Jewish, Danish, Yugoslav and German grafts onto that tree. My father’s family has its roots in Yorkshire; my mother’s in Worcestershire. Both of my parents – purely by accident, I must suppose – instilled in me a deep love and affection for the Mother Country. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a particular affection for the poetry and prose literature and the history of Great Britain in general and of England in particular.
   
   I responded eagerly to attempts by my sixth-grade science teacher to interest me in the plays and poems of Shakespeare, and by my eighth-grade social studies teacher to sway me to a kind of Tory socialism. Upon moving to Rhode Island, I discovered Samuel Johnson and Charles Gore, and went easily from the Peace Church tradition into Anglo-Catholicism, and the litany of English poets, novelists, critics and moralists who have influenced me from that tradition should, by now, be one well-known to my gentle readers. The key factor swaying me into the Orthodox Church was no Eastern saint or Father, in fact, but rather the historical writings of a humble, kindly and learned English Benedictine who was heavily-versed in both.

That’s all I mean by ‘Anglo-Orthodox’: an Orthodox Christian, who is also a literary Anglophile and of English extraction. I can understand the reservations of my questioners, though; If I were to have called myself, say, a ‘Jewish Orthodox’, I could be justly reproached for using a language that might confuse me with Orthodox Jews! A similar principle may apply here. By ‘Anglo-Orthodox’ I do not mean anything connected with the schismatic-Miaphysite British Orthodox Church. By ‘Anglo-Orthodox’ I do not even mean anything even as relatively innocuous as a follower of Julius Joseph Overbeck, or an adherent of the Western Rite of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. If anything, what I mean when I say ‘Anglo-Orthodox’ may be indicated by the religious understanding of the great philosopher Richard Swinburne when he said that joining the Orthodox Church was more an affirmation of every single one of the good and true things he had believed already, all along.

So, please consider this an official apology on my part, an explanation which I can only hope is not too self-serving, and a long-overdue clarification of an ambiguity I’ve been negligently perpetuating for far too long.

What God hath conjoined…

It never ceases to bemuse me that so many of the people who seem to be most romantically-inclined to the Jacobite cause are also those who don’t quite know what to make of that one most important aspect of the Stuart legacy: namely, the grand personal union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England that occurred in 1603. Indeed, on this very day, the 12^th of April, a little over three years later, the patriarch from whose hathel lend every one of the Stuart kings descend, commissioned this very flag to signify that union.

King James I of England, VI of Scotland himself said this as well:

What God hath conjoined let no man separate. I am the husband and the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head and it is my body; I am the shepherd and it is my flock. I hope therefore that no man will think that I, a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives; that I being the head should have a divided or monstrous body or that being the shepherd to so fair a flock should have my flock parted in two.

It must be noted that the Stuart kings, not just James I but also notably the martyred Charles I, proved themselves to be opponents of the enclosures movement and the appropriations of Church and common land that had been so common in the preceding centuries (and in the centuries to come) – in a way which appealed to the rural peasantry on both sides of the Wall. Charles I has even been described as ‘the one English monarch of outstanding importance as an agrarian reformer’. But even going back to James I, the government was taking an active interest in the well-being of the vulnerable rural poor in both Scotland and England. From this historical treatment, even though how sincere this interest was is an open question, the generality of the policies it inspired is not: both rural Scots and rural Englishmen had a strong stake - even their whole livelihoods - in these policies.

The Jacobite risings coming after 1688, it must be noted, were an alliance of Highland Scots with their High Church brethren in Northern England. They were hardly a Scottish national movement as such; instead it becomes necessary to note that they were a broad alliance of Englishmen and Scots who protested in common cause against a bureaucratic, capitalist new order. By and large, the Jacobites were in favour of preserving the commons, the cottage and the village; the elder style and pace of life that prevailed on the Highlands. They were the last vestiges of a nobility and free yeomanry who fought the extension of the enclosures into the Highlands (which amounted to a particularly brutal form of land theft from the peasants who had until then held the land in common) – a free yeomanry, it cannot be stressed enough, that was every bit as much English as it was Scottish. Though 1688 undoubtedly brought with it an urge to centralise and rationalise the affairs of the two countries and bring them under the control of London, so too it cannot be denied that the opposition to 1688 was not a purely nationalist phenomenon.

Even these tidbits of 17^th-century English history show, I hope, that the real interests of the working class in Britain are the same regardless of whether they are localised in Scotland, England, Wales or Ireland. As David Lindsay points out, political patterns and preferences across Great Britain vary far more by class and religious preference than they do by place of national origin (however that is determined, and the excellent Mr. Lindsay more than once has pointed out the dubiousness of attempting to do so).

I confess to having a small, but real, personal stake in this question. The free-yeoman Cooper family – spelt Cowper back in 1688 – has been referred to in our genealogical records both as English and as Scottish. Some romantically, but as yet unconvincingly, trace us back to an origin in Fife. But the fact of the matter was that William Cowper was first a High Church Anglican, later a Quaker, who was forced to emigrate to Pennsylvania in 1699 either because of his religious convictions, or because of his Nonjuror politics. (At the time, it behoves me to note, the two would have gone hand in hand.) He lived in Pennsylvania, both among other Quakers from elsewhere in England, and among Scottish indentured men and smallholders who made up the frontier population of the time. Some among his descendants would continue to embrace a radical-traditionalist vision; my direct ancestor Jacob Cooper was a Tory, in fact, and wound up on the enemies list of the revolutionary committees of South Carolina. It is hard to say what they were, if not partisans of that Kingdom of Great Britain which King James I proclaimed.

Does North American cultural history provide for a ‘third option’?

Cross-posted from Front Porch Republic and Solidarity Hall:

Having read several books on American history recently, including Colin Woodard’s book American Nations, itself based partly on David Hackett Fischer’s four-nation thesis in Albion’s Seed and sociologist William Graham Sumner’s thesis on American Folkways, there are several particularly interesting directions which open themselves up for discussion. Woodard’s treatment of American history as a series of ethno-national conflicts within and beneath the governments on the American continent is intriguing and in some ways highly appealing, particularly for those of us who value culture and those institutions which lie outside and under our current corporate-consumerist climate and partisan politics. Some of us may even want to nod along understandingly at Woodard’s invocation of ‘deep-seated preferences and attitudes’. At the same time, though, Woodard has an interest in tying his thesis directly into an analysis of American politics that never really quite translates, and as a result masks several blind spots.

The analysis of the nations themselves is easy enough to understand, and even defensible enough; the characterisations are compelling and in large part intuitive to the American imagination, even if, perhaps, a few of the particulars may be quibbled over. But part of the problem is that there are political currents on the governmental level which need to be explained in terms other than the ones he gives. Woodard expresses in the most vehement and polemical terms his hostility to the idea, for example, that there is anything in her Loyalist history which distinguishes Canadian from American society – and holds up instead the idea that Canadian society is better explained by a different configuration of dominant cultural-national strands (those of Midland America, New France and Yankeedom) than the coalitional confrontation that prevails in her southern neighbour (between Yankeedom and the Deep South). It’s a just-so story: the fact that it ‘just so’ happens to mesh perfectly with his thesis seems, well, a trifle suspect.

Woodard still has to confront that Canada does have a Loyalist history, and that that history still has some pull over the Canadian imagination, though that pull has been declining over the past thirty-five years or so. There is an ideal of peace, order and good government in Canada which is in some ways profoundly conservative, yet which opens itself up to considerations of social embeddedness and common good that have largely been the stock-and-trade of the political left. There has been, in short, a red Tory political option in Canada which gets relatively short shrift here. If we imagine, as Woodard does, that the ideological priorities of modern progressivism can be explained by a national-cultural alliance led by Yankeedom, and that those of modern movement conservatism are the result of an alliance led by the Deep South – what then explains this historical strand in Canadian politics?

Woodard states explicitly that the Loyalist emigration (mostly from the Midlands and from New Netherland) was motivated primarily by economic and political necessity, as well as by a British policy incentive of cheap land in Upper Canada to new settlers. Furthermore, he argues that the Loyalists lacked cultural cohesion – which seems to be something of a contradiction. One of the distinguishing marks of Midland culture is its pluralism, after all. Another tack he takes is the division between ‘true’ and ‘late’ Loyalists: this also doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny unless one subscribes to the myth that all the ‘true’ Loyalists were wealthy, since it seems the mark of the ‘late’ Loyalist was his poverty. The explanation of a Canadian national consciousness is never made particularly clear, and the answer to that question is begged. Is the red Tory option a natural cultural outgrowth, a political expression of Midland preferences and ideals? Is it something imposed from above, a kind of alien ideological conformity imprinted by the British Crown and an elite eager to retain its transatlantic ties? Or is it something else entirely?

Allow me to disclose some of my personal biases here. Reading Woodard’s book, I could not help but identify keenly with the postulated Midland culture. My cultural priorities have been shaped by the peace church tradition. I was brought up in a Mennonite church, alongside children of Midland expats from Goshen. Additionally, my paternal family tree partakes heavily of Quaker and immigrant radicalism. It would be personally gratifying, in a ‘nationalistic’ sense, to think that the Midland identity is robust enough to support its own, ‘third-option’ political programme. And I think there is some support for that idea. But the proposition of a ‘third option’ arising from the Midland folkway can’t be simply assumed for vanity’s sake, or for the sake of proving (or disproving) a thesis of cultural distinctiveness that undercuts national borders. This is how Woodard describes the Midlands:

Arguably the most ‘American’ of the nations… founded by English Quakers, who welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate, even apathetic.

There are elements of this that might explain some aspects of the red Tory ideal. The suspicion of ideology has always been a hallmark of the high Toryism from which many red Tory thinkers and statesmen from Sir John A. MacDonald onward have drunk deep. And the sympathy with which some red Tories have embraced non-Marxist ‘left’ economic theories like distributism and social credit might indicate a certain affinity with the communitarian utopianism of the English Quakers. And one might even argue that the red Tory affinity for government presence in the national life has been relatively selective, though the markedly unenthusiastic response of Ron Dart to the use of the term ‘red Toryism’ by Phillip Blond would indicate that Canadian conservatives have historically been more amenable to government interventions in economic life than even their British conservative counterparts have been, let alone their American ones.

The Loyalist option was drummed out of existence in the Thirteen through force of arms, being displaced by the ideologies of Hamilton, Jefferson and (later) Jackson. But it is possible that some remnants, some fragments and echoes of the Loyalist idea have been carried within the Quaker and German immigrant culture that spread out in a narrow band to the west until it reached the Great Plains. The radical movement which encompassed the Greenback Party, the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, though by no means monarchical in any way, shape or form, still nevertheless carried about it more than a little of the old high-Tory moralism. It stood firmly on the idea that government should not be run for the benefit of the mercantile interests of the Northeast nor for the benefit of the plantation owners of the Southeast. Neither were they particularly bedazzled by the rugged individualist mythos of Andrew Jackson preferred in his native Appalachia, being attracted instead to cooperative self-help. They represented a true ‘third option’ in American politics.

The Greenback Party grew in the wake of the Civil War out of the theories put forward by New York City dry-goods merchant Edward Kellogg in his book Labour and Other Capital, and in various other venues under the anagrammatic pseudonym Godek Gardwell. But interestingly enough, enthusiasm for his monetary ideas was most ardent in places like Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania – exactly along the narrow belt which Woodard points to as the Western passage of expansion of the Midland ‘nation’. So much so, in fact, that using greenbacks – the paper currency that had been issued by the government, rather than by a private bank, during the Civil War – to forgive farmers’ debts to the banks, came to be called the ‘Ohio idea.’ The Greenback Party itself was founded in Indianapolis, and to an intriguing extent, it represented the old Loyalist alliance between New York City businessmen and Midland farmers. The two most visible proponents of Greenback theories in the 1870’s were native New York inventor Peter Cooper (no relation to yours truly) and congressman Samuel F. Cary of Cincinnati, Ohio.

After the Greenback Party collapsed in the 1880’s, Kellogg’s monetary ideas hopscotched into the nascent Farmers’ Alliance, which was busily making inroads amongst poor farmers of the Appalachian interior, who were then fleeing into Texas from permanent debt-servitude to the furnishing merchants of the coastal Deep South. Once again latching onto ideas of self-help through farmers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, they met with limited success – largely because vanishingly few commercial banks (North or South) would lend to them, seeing more profit in siding with the furnishing merchants. They began to understand that their livelihoods and their self-determination stood or fell on national economic and monetary policies which would discipline usurers large and small – and so the ideas of Kellogg and the veteran greenbackers of New York City, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana began to spread westward.

But Alliance Populism – though it took root solidly amongst poor whites and poor blacks both in the Deep South and throughout Appalachia toward the end of the 1880’s – retained a firm base of support in the West. The states which most reliably supported local Alliances, which sent itinerant lecturers into the Deep South to organise, and which stood by the comprehensive Omaha Platform of 1892 even as the People’s Party’s own statesmen were busy selling them out to the Democrats for short-term electoral gain, were North Dakota, Kansas and northern Texas – all of which are very notably represented in Woodard’s geographical description of the Midlands.

This strand of American history rather stands witness against Woodard’s description of the Midlands as quiescent, ‘moderate, even apathetic,’ and the holder of the key ‘swing vote,’ as though it could not be home to independent political ideas of its own! On the contrary, both the Quaker folkway and the achtundvierziger immigrants newly-transplanted from revolutionary central Europe gave articulation to a political tradition that was radical, populist and amenable neither to bland financial-corporate Yankee liberalism, nor to crassly avaricious oligarchical Deep Southern rapine. It certainly did not acquiesce quietly to the demands of the ‘progressive society.’ It is no accident at all, and certainly no surprise, that thinkers of a certain radical Tory persuasion in Britain – thinkers like G. K. Chesterton, A. J. Penty, A. R. Orage and Major C. H. Douglas – picked up on some of these ideas, and some of this anti-usury activism, that had gestated in the formerly-Loyalist regions of America. Naturally, they drew them up in specifically British forms. Further, it is no accident that half a generation later, on the plains frontier of the Canadian West, the ideas of Major Douglas would give rise to a relatively-successful social-credit movement. Domestically, in the state of Nebraska, the populist idea would find a full-throated advocate in the critical student of Marx and Freud, and brilliant historian, Christopher Lasch.

The utopian, radical Quaker potentials of Middle American society have unfortunately undergone something of a dormancy in recent years, just as the red Tory ideal has to our north. If at least part of Woodard’s thesis is correct, though, and American folkways are still present even under a homogenising globally-minded consumerism, then perhaps there is reason to hope that we haven’t yet heard the last of Midwestern populism.