Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square:

A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh

by Gassalasca Jape, S. J.

“The people swarmed on the public square
And pointed laughingly at me,
And I was filled with shame and fear.”

–Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov

Contents

• The Situation is Very Good
• Evangelical Self-Fashioning
• If You Liked the Movie
• Just Out
• The Middle Mind
• What Would it Profit a Man

The Situation is Very Good, it is Hopeless

Irrepressible Hope

ast November, introducing the inaugural issue of the Brandywine Review of Faith & International Affairs in his own journal First Things, Father Richard John Neuhaus noted that “a publication marked ‘Volume 1, Number 1’ is always bracing evidence of irrepressible hope.” The publication of our own “Volume 1, Number 1” gives us good cause to reflect on Fr. Neuhaus’s comment, both for what it says about journals of opinion and for what it says about hope. “Bracing” is one of Neuhaus’s favorite words, and he isn’t sparing in his use of it. “Bracing stuff, that,” is a phrase often seen in his monthly columns in First Things. For all its Chestertonian gusto, Neuhaus’s imprimatur “bracing stuff” is often a rhetorical genuflection toward something transcendentally good, but while the reader’s gaze is directed upward, crucial questions go unasked. Neuhaus’s comments regarding the advent of a new journal of Christian opinion are significant in that he gestures towards the transcendent good of “irrepressible hope” while at the same time avoiding the important question, which is: Hope in what?

Certainly the proliferation of all manner of journals of opinion (such as this one) addressing themselves in some manner to the “crisis of this age” is evidence of a need for hope in something. The perception has been growing for some time that the order of Western Civilization is more vulnerable now than at any time since the Protestant Reformation: threats from without coinciding with threats from within seem, at times, to portend coming disaster. Enlightenment liberalism—the new consensus of “public truth” which emerged from the Reformation—is widely viewed by orthodox Christians (though not only orthodox Christians) as diseased: the principle of the autonomous individual having resulted in the widespread western sins of sexual licentiousness, abortion on demand, gross materialist consumerism, and the denigration of any serious effort towards religious faith. At the same time, the liberal western order is beset from without by increasingly aggressive competing ideologies, most notably, radical Islam.

This situation puts religious conservatives in a difficult quandary. On the one hand, continued criticism of the liberal order feels like an act of disloyalty to the entire western tradition, which is still, after all, the tradition that Christianity built. Moreover, liberalism remains the only viable “public truth,” and so continued dissent becomes a self-imposed exile into the wilderness of public irrelevance. But on the other hand, strengthening and restoring the liberal order feels, for the orthodox Christian, like giving aid and comfort to the enemy, for that is what liberalism has often become to the traditional Christian conception of what is good, true, and beautiful. It is this situation that Neuhaus has described as “the divided soul of American liberalism.”

J. Bottum, a friend of Neuhaus’s and former editor at First Things recently put the problem this way:

[As] liberalism’s triumph worked itself out over the last two centuries, certain people have felt the desire to get off the boat. For some in America, for instance, the impetus was the disaster of socialist economics. For others it was an inability to stomach abortion. For others it was crime rates. For others it was euthanasia. For a few recent converts it is biotechnology and cloning. But, for all of them, a point is reached where they decide, “This is where I say, ‘Enough.’ This is a good place to stop.”

The problem with this approach, according to Bottum, is that “each disembarking group proves to have been seeking not to undo modernity but to freeze it at a particular moment—a moment when certain vestigial elements left over from the premodern world kept at bay the worst effects of modern times. And yet, lacking a coherent unmodern philosophy, we can offer no compelling reasons for modernity to stop where we wish it to.” Thus, the argument goes, once the liberal motor of individual autonomy and choice is started, its momentum is too powerful to stop with merely passive “freezing” strategies; a stronger, opposing, premodern force must be brought to bear.

Healing the Divided Soul

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