Grumpiness & It's Not All Politics Induced (Part 5) - Intellectual Integrity

 The echocardiogram did a number on me. I have to admit that. This morning, I woke grumpy from stiffness and achiness. 

I made a trip to the convenience store for cigarettes and caffeine. Then I started on the email. 

First stop, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two things I like about LARB. It is not as stodgy as the New York Review of Books without sacrificing a quality of writing, and it is free.

Here is Part 5.

What I expected from No Love Lost for Heretics is not what I got. What I got was intellectual integrity. Brad East reviews Jerome E. Copulsky’s “American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order.” I thought I would hear about Christian Nationalism; which as an Eastern Orthodox Christian I call heresies. 

Copulsky has a few reasons for giving these figures attention. The first is that “heretical” Christian politics have been resurgent in the last decade. In response, this book offers a rough genealogy or taxonomy of similarly illiberal and religious interventions going back to the nation’s founding. The second reason is that understanding this history might aid in “the dispute between those who insist that America was founded as a ‘Christian nation’ and those who maintain that the Founders intended the country to be a ‘secular republic.’” Insofar as the American mainstream comprises these two poles, Copulsky wants opposed factions to see how much they have in common—not least a pious reverence for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the ideas and intentions that animate them.

In effect, Copulsky wants to redraw the boundaries so that if you affirm these things, then it follows as a matter of course that you are orthodox (the American dogma lives loudly in you). Beyond these borders, by contrast, are the unorthodox, whose faith in the founding documents is incomplete or dubious. Such people are heretics. And in every age, orthodoxy has known just what to do with those who espouse heresy.

The third reason for the book, unstated by Copulsky but clear to this reader, is to see “heresy” not as marginal to American politics but as part and parcel of it. In other words, American heretics are no less mainstream than true believers. It’s been a mess from the start. The argument didn’t conclude in 1776 or 1789—that’s when it began. And ever since, heretics have been at the center of the fractious disputation that is our politics, preaching their doctrines and hawking their wares without interruption.

Okay, that sounds like a worthwhile enterprise. Then Mr. East digs in:

...Nowhere, however, does Copulsky delineate the orthodox presuppositions that inform his perspective (or, apparently, his imagined readers). Moreover, he inadvertently reinforces the very distinction—outside and inside, heresy and dogma, marginal and mainstream—that his book successfully deconstructs. It turns out that the orthodox are right in virtue of being insiders just as the heretics are wrong in virtue of being outsiders: a perfect petitio principii.

Yet far more than an intellectual designation, “heretic” is a function and tool of social hygiene, a way of pronouncing who belongs and who does not. Once pronounced, the reasons no longer matter. The guilty lie under the ban. “Anathema” does not mean wrong. It means accursed.

The chief problem with American Heretics, then, is that it is one long exercise in begging the question. Readers will look in vain for arguments defending or establishing Copulsky’s views. He leaves them mostly unspoken, and only occasionally, through insinuations and ingratiating asides, makes them known. The result is of a piece with recent approaches to political and intellectual history that consist entirely of quotation and paraphrase, the bulk of it introduced with a smirk and capped by a sneer. Call it the passive-aggressive style in Trump-era historiography. The author conspires with readers to ogle and gawk at the strange wrong-thinkers on display without ever finding it within themselves to strike up a conversation or ask an honest question. The one thing they know in advance is that they have nothing to learn from the encounter.

It is this not asking questions of one's ideas and presupposing the answers of the opposition that I find truly deplorable. I stand with my church because I agree that Christ's message is not for whites only. Why others think differently I do not understand and think we should understand.

I close with Mr. Read's conclusion:

The book wears its lack of charity like a badge of honor. For this reason, I found myself wishing I were in better hands, including Lilla’s. Lilla may presume an “us” and a “them,” but his virtues as an interpreter far outweigh this minor vice. His readings, for example, of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault—intellectual foes all—are generous, patient, and eager to discover why someone might find their ideas attractive. The same goes for Albert Murray on James Baldwin, Matthew Rose on Oswald Spengler, Christopher Hitchens on Allan Bloom, Clive James on Evelyn Waugh, Roger Scruton on Theodor Adorno, George Scialabba on Ivan Illich, Tony Judt on Leszek Kołakowski, or Christopher Caldwell on Wolfgang Streeck. These are men of the Left and of the Right treating their ideological foes with care and respect, giving their ideas serious consideration. Why? For one, because they know that by doing so, they may happen upon insights they would otherwise lack. For another, because one cannot win a fight without sizing up one’s opponent. It is regrettable that Copulsky did not follow their lead.

In the end, my objection is not to Copulsky’s liberalism, much less to his legitimate concerns about integralism and dominion theology and a host of other issues. My objection is that readers who share his political commitments will close his book utterly confirmed in every one of their priors, not once challenged to reconsider why they believe what they do, and above all, never tweaked, never piqued, never wooed, if only for a moment, to wonder whether any of these heretics might have a point.

If liberalism is based on reason, then it needs to maintain the integrity of its rationality. Otherwise, it is only another descent into emotional tribalism.

sch 8/2