Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Leftist faith and Sarah Palin

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In observing the sheer bloody-mindedness with which some on the Left cling, in the face of almost all evidence*, to the “Sarah Palin is a moron” meme, I’ve come to a conclusion: some liberals are just firmly convinced that all conservatives are stupid, or else we wouldn’t be conservatives. This just seems to be an article of absolute faith, core dogma, for some on the Left, judging by the way they treat folks on the Right. Given that, no amount of evidence to the contrary can shake their conviction; they dogmatically insist that Sarah Palin is a moron, with no supporting evidence offered save the fact that she’s conservative, and therefore by definition must be a moron. It’s simply a matter of faith that they are the enlightened ones, and she is not.

Which is to say that perhaps we’ve been wrong in talking about conservative Christians as the “faith-based community”; there’s a section of the Left that’s every bit as much a faith-based community as all that. The difference is, their faith isn’t in God, but rather in their own superiority.

*Sure, there’s the Katie Couric interview, in which Gov. Palin most assuredly did not acquit herself well—though even there, she did a lot better than the editing made her look. But hey, even the brightest folks look really dumb sometimes; at least she didn’t say there are 57 states, or that Austrians speak Austrian, or give the British government a middling assortment of DVDs that can’t be played in Britain, or try to get into the Oval Office through a window. Even Barack Obama looks like an imbecile at times, and Joe Biden like a blithering idiot—though to be sure, VP Biden actually is a blithering idiot . . .

A few links on Iran

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On The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez posted a brief interview with Daniel Pipes, director of theMiddle East Forum and a Fellow of the Hoover Institution, on the current situation in Iran. As always, Pipes has some interesting things to say, including his statement that “the startling events in Iran in the week since the election have transformed [Mir Hossein] Mousavi from a hack Islamist politician into the unlikely symbol of dreams for a more secular and free Iran,” and his judgment that Ahmadinejad and the mullahs have been seriously weakened by the protests. (Bernard-Henri Lévy agrees.) Perhaps his most interesting comment, though, is his concluding observation:

I am taken aback by the nearly complete absence of Islam in the discussion. One hears about democracy, freedom, and justice, all of which do play a role, but the key issue is the Iranian population’s repudiation of the Islamist ideology that has dominated its lives for the past 30 years. Should the regime in Tehran be shaken by current challenges, this will likely have profound implications for the global career of radical Islam.

This dovetails with what I’ve heard from other sources (as do the comments by Jared Cohen which I noted last week) that disillusionment with Islam is widespread in Iran, especially among younger Iranians; I would imagine that if the regime were in fact to collapse, what would remain would still be a Muslim country, but a rather exhausted one (perhaps analogous to Europe after the end of the religious wars of the 17th century).

As regards the president’s tepid response to the protests in Iran, Michael Ledeen posted the following:

I’ve received what purports to be a statement from Mousavi’s Office in Tehran. Like everyone else covering the revolution, I get a lot of material that can’t be authenticated, and one must always take such material with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said, the person who sent this to me is undoubtedly in touch with the Mousavi people on the ground, that much is certain. His information has been proven reliable throughout this period. So while the following open letter carefully puts distance between the author(s) and Mousavi himself, I am quite sure that at a minimum it accurately reflects the state of mind of the Mousavi people.

The letter expresses strong displeasure with Barack Obama:

In the name of the Iranian people, we want you to know that when you recently made the statement “Achmadinejad or Mousavi? Two of a kind,” we consider this as a grave and deep insult, not just to Mr. Mousavi but especially against the judgment of the Iranian people, against our moral conviction and intelligence, especially those of the young generation that comprises a population of 31 million.

It is a specially grave insult for those who are now fighting for democracy and freedom, and an unwarranted gift and even praise for Mr. Khamenei, whose security forces are now killing peaceful Iranians in the streets of every major city in the country.

Your statement misled the people of the world. It was no doubt inspired by your hope for dialogue with this regime, but you cannot possibly believe in promises from a regime that lies to its own people and then kills them when they demand the promises be kept.

By such statements, your administration and you discourage the Iranian people, who believe and trust in the values of democracy and freedom. We are pleased to see that you have condemned the regime’s murderous violence, and we look forward to stronger support for the rightful struggle of the Iranian people against the actions of a regime that is your enemy as well as ours.

Ledeen’s post includes several other important things as well, including an excerpt from a speech Mousavi made yesterday. Meanwhile, the inimitable Rich Lowry posted on The Corner imagining how President Obama might have handled several other touchy international situations throughout history, including the Nazi air assault on London:

Any time a city is bombed for 57 straight nights, we take notice. That is something that interests us. We hope all national air forces involved in this dismaying conflict behave responsibly.

Fortunately, British PM Gordon Brown is taking up the slack; leaving the field free for him might be the nicest thing the Obama administration has done for the British government yet (not that there’s any competition for that particular honor).

“We are with others, including the whole of the European Union unanimously today, in condemning the use of violence, in condemning media suppression,” Brown said in Brussels after an EU summit.

“It is for Iran now to show the world that the elections have been fair . . . that the repression and the brutality that we have seen in these last few days is not something that is going to be repeated.

“We want Iran to be part of the international community and not to be isolated. But it is for Iran to prove . . . that they can respect these basic rights,” he said. . . .

During his rant, Ayatollah Khamenei called Britain “the most treacherous” enemy of Iran.

The Iranians have set their sights on Britain because they know they have a cream puff in the White House. Britain poses problems because it can push for EU trade sanctions against Iran.

Brown didn’t roll over when the ayatollah attacked. He hit back. On Friday, Brown’s Foreign Office summoned the Iranian ambassador and sharply critiqued Iranian attacks on Britain and the election process.

After demonstrating weakness, an embarrassed Obama administration slowly and reluctantly has ramped up its criticism of the tyrannical regime in Iran. . . .

Given the opportunity to simply support democracy, Obama decided to take a pass.

The unanswered question is why Barack Obama has been determined to coddle this crazed regime in Tehran.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though, and the one here is considerable; as Jeffrey Goldberg points out, fear of Iran has largely outweighed the hostility of Sunni Arab governments toward Israel, creating the possibility of a Sunni-Israeli alliance. At the very least, as I noted late last year, those Arab governments would dearly love for Israel to take down Iran and its proxies before Iran has the chance to come after them. How this will all play out, I don’t know (certainly, it isn’t as if we have a long history of things breaking right in modern southern/southwestern Asia), but at least there’s the possibility of good things happening.

Update: At least something convinced President Obama to take a stand against the Iranian government and its use of violence against its own people; I don’t know if it was the killings, the poll numbers, or what, but whatever the case, it’s welcome.

 

Thought on the true nature and purpose of the conscience

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As I’ve noted before, “conscience” is a problematic word in our culture—not because it’s a hard concept to understand, but because we find it a hard one to accept. We don’t want our conscience to be something that pokes at us and makes us face the fact when we’re doing something wrong; we tend to want to do what we want to do, and we want to believe that if we can convince ourselves we feel good about doing what we want to do, then it must be OK.

As such, what a lot of folks in this world end up doing is essentially turning their conscience off—refusing to pay attention to its promptings, finding ways to dismiss it, teaching themselves to feel good (at least on the surface) about doing what they want to do, and then calling that good feeling their conscience. That way, they can tell themselves (and whoever else might happen to come around) that their conscience is clear about their actions.

Unfortunately, if we really want to, it’s not all that hard to get ourselves to the point where we’re standing proudly defiant of the will of God in the absolute (if self-generated) conviction that we’re obeying his will; and to the casual observer, it can be difficult to distinguish such stands from true acts of conscience. After all, Martin Luther launched the Reformation, in part, with an appeal to conscience, refusing to bow to the power of the Roman church because “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe”; these days, there are a lot of folks running around who want to be little Luthers, condemning the church for its teachings and declaring, “Here I stand.” Some are very convincing.

What too many people lack, though, is the central point of Luther’s statement: “My conscience is captive to the word of God”; this is the foundation for everything else. If your conscience is captive to the word of God, if your focus is on obeying God even when it’s the last thing you want to do, if you’ve been training and strengthening your conscience in faithful study of the Scriptures and in prayer—as Luther had—then yes, to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. If not, then you may very well be going against conscience and not even know it.

The key point is that conscience is not self-generated, because we aren’t the arbiters of reality—no, not even of “our own” reality, because there’s no such thing; whether we like it or not, our reality is the same as everyone else’s. The purpose of conscience isn’t to give us the perception of moral reality that suits our preferences, but rather to help us perceive moral reality as it is—to tell us what truly is right and wrong, not to confirm us in our own ideas and wishes on the subject.

This isn’t something we always want (which is why any person who truly functions as the conscience of an organization is going to be intensely unpopular at times), but it’s something we need, and badly, because we aren’t pure; we’re sullied by sin in all its various forms, and that distorts and occludes our judgment. As much as we may want to be the highest authority in our lives, we just aren’t qualified for the job—and it’s not so much what we don’t know that gets us into trouble (significant though that often is) as what we do know that ain’t so; it’s especially those things that we convince ourselves we know, not because of the available evidence, but because we desperately want to believe them. Those are the areas where we most need correction—and the areas in which we’re least willing to accept it; the role of conscience is precisely to convict and correct us at the points where we least want it, to inflict discomfort in order to prevent greater pain.

 

(Derived from “God’s Grace, Our Counterfeit”)

The wikification of U.S. intelligence

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This is highly encouraging:

The key, of course (as the video notes) is not the existence of Intellipedia but rather a shift in mindset among our various intelligence agencies—a shift which has yet to occur—from the fiefdom/guildhall-type thinking that has long prevailed to a truly wikified approach to the production of intelligence. This will be difficult for them, but as Marc Ambinder points out, the potential rewards of such a shift are high:

Rasmussen proposes a new production method called “transparent review” that would remove the walls between collaboration and agency vetting. On the same “page,” it would allow different agencies to revise and review the Wiki in question, and then, if they approved of the substance, endorse it, right there on the page. Or, if they differed, they’d be given the space, right there on the page, to explain why. The beauty of this construct is that the dynamism of the intelligence analytical product is kept but the totality of the product becomes authoritative. Dissent is still allowed; consensus is not necessarily encouraged.

On Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and the importance of grace

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Speaking of Garry Wills, I’ve been ruminating lately on his superb essay on Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which he rightly calls “Lincoln’s greatest speech.” I appreciate Wills’ piece a great deal, since he does a good job of setting the Second Inaugural in its proper context and then offers a careful, thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the speech’s purpose and line of thought. In particular, though he makes the case that Lincoln’s aim was to lay the groundwork for a pragmatic approach to Reconstruction—an approach based on only one fixed principle, that of the abolition of slavery, and in all other respects concerned solely with what would work best to restore a functioning Union—he shows clearly how the president’s argument to that purpose was fundamentally not political but theological, and rooted in a strong sense of the humility proper to human aspirations and human ability to plan and predict consequences in the face of the power, wisdom and will of Almighty God. As Wills writes,

The problem with compromise on this scale is that it seems morally neutral, open even to injustices if they work. Answering that objection was the task Lincoln set himself in the Second Inaugural. Everything said there was meant to prove that pragmatism was, in this situation, not only moral but pious. Men could not pretend to have God’s adjudicating powers. People had acted for mixed motives on all sides of the civil conflict just past. The perfectly calibrated punishment or reward for each leader, each soldier, each state, could not be incorporated into a single political disposition of the problems. As he put it on April 11,

And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state; and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and, withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and colatterals [sic]. Such [an] exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement.

Abstract principle can lead to the attitude Fiat iustitia, ruat coelum—”Justice be done, though it bring down the cosmos.” Lincoln had learned to have a modest view of his ability to know what ultimate justice was, and to hesitate before bringing down the whole nation in its pursuit. He asked others to recognize in the intractability of events the disposing hand of a God with darker, more compelling purposes than any man or group of men could foresee. . . .

The war was winding down; but Lincoln summoned no giddy feelings of victory. A chastened sense of man’s limits was the only proper attitude to bring to the rebuilding of the nation, looking to God for guidance but not aspiring to replace him as the arbiter of national fate.

Wills further quotes a letter from Lincoln to Thurlow Weed on this subject:

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford [an occasion?] for me to tell it.

In general, the thought and intent of our greatest president’s greatest work—which is, I think, perhaps the greatest piece of political theology ever produced on this continent—shines brightly through this essay. The one thing Wills doesn’t quite get is the way in which the address works and grapples with the grace of God. On the one hand, he says,

Americans must be judged in a comprehensive judgment binding on all—God’s judgment on slavery, which was to be worked out of the system with pains still counted in the nation’s “sinking debt” of guilt. There was no “easy grace” of all-round good will in the message. The speech was flexible, but it was flexible steel.

On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to fully understand what that means, because he writes,

People who stress only Lincoln’s final words about charity for all, about the healing of wounds, may think that Lincoln was calling for a fairly indiscriminate forgiveness toward the South, especially since he referred to the North’s share in the guilt for slavery. But the appeal to “Gospel forgiveness” is preceded by a submission to “Torah judgment” and divine wrath—an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness.

What I think Wills fails to understand here (perhaps due to a lack of exposure to Reformed thought) is that this isn’t an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness at all, but rather a necessary one if one is to avoid cheap grace. Those of us in the Reformed stream of Christian thought well understand, as Lincoln clearly understood, is that the good news of grace not onlycan but must be stated in the context of—indeed, as a response to—the bad news of human sin and divine wrath.

It’s precisely this understanding which enabled Lincoln to strike the balance which Wills rightly sees as central to the purpose of the Second Inaugural Address, which enabled the president to argue for “a moral flexibility—with emphasis on morality,” and thus to stake out a pragmatic position that meant more than mere lowest-common-denominator pragmatism. One would, I think, be correct in arguing that the failure of the American government to strike that balance after Lincoln’s death is the primary reason that Reconstruction ultimately collapsed into a form of least-common-denominator political pragmatism that set the cause of racial equality in this country back over half a century and more.

 

The most irritating political meme of our time

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has to be “take back our country.” It drove me nuts when I heard it ad nauseam from liberals over the past eight years, and it’s continuing to drive me nuts now that I’m hearing it from conservatives. Not to go all Woody Guthrie on everyone, but this sort of language logically implies that the country has been improperly “taken” by those who have no right to it, that it’s “ours” not “theirs” and we have the right to “take it back” from whoever isn’t “us”—and this is just bunk. It’s all of a piece, attitude-wise, with the folks in Colorado a few years ago who were trying to change the law to allocate the state’s Electoral College delegates proportionally rather than on a winner-take-all basis, supposedly because “their votes hadn’t counted” in 2004 because Bush won the state’s delegates. Yes, their votes counted; they lost. That’s how the system works.

In the same way, my vote counted last November, and on the national level, my side lost. The idea that this somehow means that “my country” has been “taken” from me and that I have the right to “take it back” is pure tripe of the most arrogant and self-righteous kind. Yes, we need to do a better job of articulating conservative principles—which means, in part, to pick candidates who can do so, preferably because they actually believe in those principles—but we have no standing to claim any sort of entitlement to victory. Quite the contrary. Learn to lose gracefully, people, and take to heart the lessons of defeat—of which the most important is humility; not only does that make the process of coming back to win the next time shorter and smoother, it makes us better people in the process.

Bogus ethics complaints of the day

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Here’s a couple more examples of the ludicrous things Gov. Palin’s opponents have tried to pull. Regardless of what they say, I can’t believe they actually take these things seriously—but they know that their complaints don’t have to be serious, substantive or reasonable to drain her energy and money. This is a campaign of persecution using the legal system as its tool, nothing more, nothing less; honor requires us to try to stop it.

 

On dealing with saints as sinners, and vice versa

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Recently, I read a bit (I don’t remember where) by Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, airing his grievances with his dead father. It wasn’t terribly gracious, but such is the way these days, and given that he clearly had a difficult relationship with his father, one can see where the various eulogies might have gotten a little old. Still, I don’t think his extended argument that everyone who had a good opinion of his father was wrong really accomplished anything much worth accomplishing.

Of more interest, I thought, was Garry Wills’ piece on the elder Buckley in the most recentAtlantic, which set out to defend its subject against the charge of elitism and snobbery (an odd charge to be mounted, when one thinks about it, against the man who famously declared that he’d rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard). Wills was, for a time, a protégé of William F. Buckley’s and quite close to him, before becoming politically and personally estranged from him over the issue of the Vietnam War, and he certainly presents a fair number of his erstwhile mentor’s warts; the difference is that he does so in the course of also trying to present some of the man’s real virtues, and thus offers a more balanced and thus more valuable picture.

There was a time when I would have been bothered to read a critical portrayal of someone I had long admired. Admittedly, depending on the person and the substance of the portrayal, that can still be bothersome, for one reason or another; but I’ve come to realize over the years that more often than not, if I’m bothered by such a thing, it means that I was expecting too much of someone simply because I admired one aspect of their life. The mature Christian, I think, is never surprised to find the saint a sinner, nor ever compelled to find the sinner any less a saint. May we bear one another’s sins with grace.