The wages of amorality, immorality, and power-lust.
The Constitution of the United States was a contract between the States that ratified it. The contract became binding not only on the States but also on their creature, the national government. (I use “national” instead of “federal” because the Constitution created a new government of strictly limited but national power.)
This written Constitution — not the minions or edicts of the national government — was to be the supreme law of the land. As the supreme law. It was meant to be a bulwark against the expansion of the powers of the national government beyond those expressly granted to it by the Constitution.
There are many influential parties, justices of the Supreme Court included, who believe that the Constitution means what a majority of the Court says it means. But, as Randy Barnett puts it, the Supreme Court
does not have the power to change the written Constitution, which always remains there to be revived when there is a political and judicial will to do so. For example, after the Supreme Court gutted the Fourteenth Amendment during Reconstruction, it remained a part of the written Constitution for a future more enlightened Supreme Court to put to good use. By the same token, the current Supreme Court can still make serious mistakes about the Constitution. Because the Constitution is in writing, there is an external “there” there by which to assess its opinions.
The real meaning of the Constitution is fixed until it is amended through the process prescribed in the Constitution itself. It is not, unlike the British constitution, a do-it-yourself project. The American Constitution was designed by master architects, who meant it to be executed as it was written. It is a blueprint, not a Rohrschach test. Liberty is still possible under the American Constitution because the document is still there, waiting to be read and enforced correctly.
I don’t expect to see such a turnaround anytime soon, and probably not even in what remains of my lifetime (10 years, more or less). The reason for my pessimism is that the foundation upon which the Constitution was built has eroded badly. The (small “l”) libertarian edifice designed by the architects of the Constitution was meant to stand on a foundation of deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian morality.
Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking a few years ago at the dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College, quoted John Adams’s address to the Massachusetts militia in 1798:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thomas underscored the critical point, one that is missing from most lamentations about the failures of the educational establishment. “The preservation of liberty,” he said in his peroration, “is not guaranteed. Without the guardrails supplied by religious conviction, popular sovereignty can devolve into mob rule, unmoored from any conception of objective truth.” [“A Genuinely Transgressive Act: On the Dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College”, The New Criterion, November 2019]
As Jennifer Roback Morse and Friedrich Hayek rightly argue (here and here), a libertarian order can be sustained only if it is built on a morality that is ingrained in social norms and inculcated by the institutions of civil society. But those norms and institutions have been undermined by a rot that began in the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, was nurtured in public schools and universities, was propagandized by the mass media, and has become enshrined in the edicts of the national government — a government that has accrued power which it was never meant to have. This has been especially true when the national government has held captive by the left, which seeks to replace civil society with an unattainable, dispiriting, and divisive Utopia that dispenses “equity”, “social justice”, and their like.
As traditional social norms and civil society were (and are) being shattered by the left, the destructive results — spelled out here by Malcolm Pollack — have merely invitedthe further growth of the state and the enactment of yet more destructive policies. Failure breeds more failure because the left cares not about consequences of its agenda. Power — absolute power — is its golden calf.
How should sane Americans respond to all of this? Pollack counsels what he calls a “acceleration”:
If things really are as bad as they seem … this whole rotten system may be so far gone, so diseased, and so at odds with the nature of human flourishing, that it must eventually collapse and die of its own accord. If that’s so, then it’s best, for the sake of our children and children’s children, if it happens sooner rather than later: the sooner we can plow Leviathan’s decomposing corpse into the ground, the sooner we can begin the process of organic regrowth….
Perhaps, then, it is best in the long run not to slow this process by incremental and ineffective political resistance. It may be that such an approach, by making the decay more gradual, will also make it somehow more bearable, day by day, and might turn it from an acute and intolerable affliction to a slow and chronic decline — a creeping Brazilification, a great national frog-boiling. Perhaps we would be wiser simply to let the cleansing fire of fever run its course, and burn itself out. It will be painful, and surely debilitating for a while, but then it will be over. And then, at last, we can awaken, blink our eyes, and get back on our feet.
Another term for the Big Guy might be all it takes. Four more years!!
I am less sanguine. Because of the extensive destruction of traditional morality and civil society that has already taken place, I doubt that America can be restored to a semblance of its pre-1960s character. (See “1963: The Year Zero”.) I doubt that the fourth “great awakening” in which America is presently mired can be succeeded by a fifth one that undoes the damage wrought by number four.
But if it could be, it would only be because of massive resurgence of traditional morality under the aegis of religion, especially religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The core of that morality is outlined in the Catholic Encyclopedia:
The precepts [of the last six of the Commandments] are meant to protect man in his natural rights against the injustice of his fellows.
His life is the object of the Fifth;
the honour of his body as well as the source of life, of the Sixth;
his lawful possessions, of the Seventh;
his good name, of the Eighth;
And in order to make him still more secure in the enjoyment of his rights, it is declared an offense against God to desire to wrong him, in his family rights by the Ninth;
Though I am a deist, I would gladly live in a society in which most of my fellow citizens believed in and adhered to the Ten Commandments, especially the last six of them. I reject the notion, promoted by nihilistic leftists, that religion per se breeds violence. In fact, a scholarly, non-sectarian meta-study, “Religion and its effects on crime and delinquency” (Medical Science Monitor, 2003; 9(8):SR79-82), offers good evidence that religiosity leads to good behavior:
[N]early all [reports] found that that there was a significant negative correlation between religiosity and delinquency. This was further substantiated by studies using longitudinal and operationally reliable definitions. Of the early reports which were either inconclusive or found no statistical correlation, not one utilized a multidimensional definition or any sort of reliability factor. We maintain that the cause of this difference in findings stemmed from methodological factors as well as different and perhaps flawed research strategies that were employed by early sociological and criminological researchers.The studies that we reviewed were of high research caliber and showed that the inverse relationship [between religiosity and delinquency] does in fact exist. It therefore appears that religion is both a short term and long term mitigat[o]r of delinquency.
But a society in which behavior is guided by the Ten Commandments seems to be receding into the past. As one headline puts it, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”. And the degree of religious belief probably is overstated because respondents tend to say the “right” thing, which (oddly) continues to be a profession of religious faith (in the hinterlands, at least).
Historian Niall Ferguson, a Briton, writes about the importance of religiosity in “Heaven Knows How We’ll Rekindle Our Religion, but I Believe We Must”:
I am not sure British people are necessarily afraid of religion, but they are certainly not much interested in it these days. Indeed, the decline of Christianity — not just in Britain but across Europe — stands out as one of the most remarkable phenomena of our times.
There was a time when Europe would justly refer to itself as “Christendom.” Europeans built the Continent’s loveliest edifices to accommodate their acts of worship. They quarreled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the Earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith.
Now it is Europeans who are the heathens. . . .
The exceptionally low level of British religiosity was perhaps the most striking revelation of a recent … poll. One in five Britons claim to “attend an organized religious service regularly,” less than half the American figure. [In light of the relationship between claimed and actual church attendance, discussed above, the actual figure for Britons is probably about 10 percent: ED.] Little more than a quarter say that they pray regularly, compared with two-thirds of Americans and 95 percent of Nigerians. And barely one in 10 Britons would be willing to die for our God or our beliefs, compared with 71 percent of Americans. . . .
Chesterton feared that if Christianity declined, “superstition” would “drown all your old rationalism and skepticism.” When educated friends tell me that they have invited a shaman to investigate their new house for bad juju, I see what Chesterton meant. Yet it is not the spread of such mumbo-jumbo that concerns me as much as the moral vacuum that de-Christianization has created. Sure, sermons are sometimes dull and congregations often sing out of tune. But, if nothing else, a weekly dose of Christian doctrine helps to provide an ethical framework for life. And it is not clear where else such a thing is available in modern Europe.
… Britons have heard a great deal from Tony Blair and others about the threat posed to their “way of life” by Muslim extremists such as Muktar Said Ibrahim. But how far has their own loss of religious faith turned Britain into a soft target — not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?
Yes, what “way of life” is being threatened — and is therefore deemed worth defending — when people do not share a strong moral bond?
I cannot resist adding one more quotation in the same vein as those from Clarence Thomas and Niall Ferguson. This comes from Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), a no-nonsense psychiatrist who, among his many intellectual accomplishments, has thoroughly skewered John Stuart Mill’s fatuous essay, On Liberty. Without further ado, here is Dalrymple on religion (“Why Religion Is Good for Us”, New Statesman, April 21, 2003):
I remember the day I stopped believing in God. I was ten years old and it was in school assembly. It was generally acknowledged that if you opened your eyes while praying, God flew out of the nearest window. That was why it was so important that everyone should shut his eyes. If I opened my eyes suddenly, I thought, I might just be quick enough to catch a glimpse of the departing deity….
Over the years, my attitude to religion has changed, without my having recovered any kind of belief in God. The best and most devoted people I have ever met were Catholic nuns. Religious belief is seldom accompanied by the inflamed egotism that is so marked and deeply unattractive a phenomenon in our post-religious society. Although the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are said to have given man a more accurate appreciation of his true place in nature, in fact they have rendered him not so much anthropocentric as individually self-centred….
[T]he religious idea of compassion is greatly superior, both morally and practically, to the secular one. The secular person believes that compassion is due to the victim by virtue of what he has suffered; the religious person believes that compassion is due to everyone, by virtue of his humanity. For the secular person, man is born good and is made bad by his circumstances. The religious person believes man is born with original sin, and is therefore imperfectible on this earth; he can nevertheless strive for the good by obedience to God.
The secularist divides humanity into two: the victims and the victimisers. The religious person sees mankind as fundamentally one.
And why not? If this life is all that you have, why let anything stand in the way of its enjoyment? Most of us self-importantly imagine that the world and all its contrivances were made expressly for us and our convenience….
The secularist de-moralises the world, thus increasing the vulnerability of potential victims and, not coincidentally, their need for a professional apparatus of protection, which is and always will be ineffective, and is therefore fundamentally corrupt and corrupting.
If a person is not a victim pure and simple, the secularist feels he is owed no compassion. A person who is to blame for his own situation should not darken the secularist’s door again: therefore, the secularist is obliged to pretend, with all the rationalisation available to modern intellectuals, that people who get themselves into a terrible mess – for example, drug addicts – are not to blame for their situation. But this does them no good at all; in fact it is a great disservice to them.
The religious person, by contrast, is unembarrassed by the moral failings that lead people to act self-destructively because that is precisely what he knows man has been like since the expulsion from Eden. Because he knows that man is weak, and has no need to disguise his failings, either from himself or from others, he can be honest in a way that the secularist finds impossible.
Though I am not religious, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible for us to live decently without the aid of religion. That is the ambiguity of the Enlightenment.
The weakening of the Judeo-Christian tradition in America is owed to enemies within (established religions trying in vain to be “relevant”) and to enemies without (leftists and nihilistic libertarians who seek every opportunity to denigrate religion). Thus the opponents of religiosity seized on the homosexual scandals in the Catholic Church not to attack homosexuality (which would go against the attackers’ party line) but to attack the Church, which teaches the immorality of the acts that were in fact committed by a relatively small number of priests.
Then there is the relentless depiction of Catholicism as an accomplice to Hitler’s brutality, about which an esteemed critic writes in a review of Rabbi David G. Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis:
Despite the misleading nature of the controversy — one which Dalin questions from the outset — the first critics of the wartime papacy were not Jews. Among the worst attacks were those of leftist non-Jews, such as Carlo Falconi (author of The Silence of Pius XII), not to mention German liberal Rolf Hochhuth, whose 1963 play, The Deputy, set the tone for subsequent derogatory media portrayals of wartime Catholicism. By contrast, says Dalin, Pope Pius XII “was widely praised [during his lifetime] for having saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.” He provides an impressive list of Jews who testified on the pope’s behalf, including Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Chaim Weizmann. Dalin believes that to “deny and delegitimize their collective memory and experience of the Holocaust,” as some have done, “is to engage in a subtle yet profound form of Holocaust denial.”
The most obvious source of the black legend about the papacy emanated from Communist Russia, a point noted by the author. There were others with an axe to grind. As revealed in a recent issue of Sandro Magister’s Chiesa, liberal French Catholic Emmanuel Mounier began implicating Pius XII in “racist” politics as early as 1939. Subsequent detractors have made the same charge, working (presumably) from the same bias.
While the immediate accusations against Pius XII lie at the heart of Dalin’s book, he takes his analysis a step further. The vilification of the pope can only be understood in terms of a political agenda — the “liberal culture war against tradition.” . . .
Rabbi Dalin sums it up best for all people of traditional moral and political beliefs when he urges us to recall the challenges that faced Pius XII in which the “fundamental threats to Jews came not from devoted Christians — they were the prime rescuers of Jewish lives in the Holocaust — but from anti-Catholic Nazis, atheistic Communists, and… Hitler’s mufti in Jerusalem.”
I believe that the incessant attacks on religion have helped to push people — especially impressionable adolescents and young adults — away from religion, to the detriment of liberty. It is not surprising that leftists tend to be anti-religious, for — as Dalrymple points out — they disdain the tenets of personal responsibility and liberty that are contained in the last six of the Ten Commandments.
Humans need no education in aggression and meddling, which come to us naturally. But we do need to learn to take responsibility for our actions and to leave others alone — and we need to learn those things when we are young. Such things will not be taught in public schools. They could be taught in homes, but are less likely to be taught there as Americans drift further from their religious roots.
Am I being hypocritical because I am unchurched and my children were not taken to church? Perhaps, but my religious upbringing imbued in me a strong sense of morality, which I tried — successfully, I believe — to convey to my children. But as time passes the moral lessons we older Americans learned through religion will attenuate unless those lessons are taught anew to younger generations.
Rather than join the left in attacking religion and striving to eradicate all traces of it from public discourse, those who claim to love liberty ought to accommodate themselves to it and even encourage its acceptance — for liberty’s sake.
Politics and Prosperity 