Rightly Regarding the American Patrimony
Many “very online” men —I think they’re men: some are bots, many are genderless pseuds — are angry. Many are also sardonic, bitter, and vengeful. These vibes are their reaction to the precipitous failure of institutions in their lifetime. I like to think that if it were me facing this crisis in my relative youth, I would have exhibited all the cardinal virtues together with faith, hope, and charity. But I don’t know that, and I’m not about to give lectures characterized by the same self-righteousness I perceive in those now trained to say some variant of “Ok, Boomer.” I don’t know what Mao’s Red Guards shouted at older folks in the Cultural Revolution as they threw them out of windows, but I’m pretty sure it roughly translates into “Ok, Boomer.”
C.S. Lewis on National Crisis
Disappointment and injustice prompt grievance, and while that grievance may prompt righteous anger, it just as easily prompts peevishness or malice. What happens when we escalate our disappointment or the injustices of others into a national crisis? C.S. Lewis lived through the two greatest crises of the twentieth century and argues that crises are an opportunity to establish the virtues and practice our vocations, or else become lost in our vices. In his 1939 chapel lecture/sermon “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis says of wartime that it “creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.” Readers of The Screwtape Letters (1941/42) therefore ought not to be surprised that the elder devil Screwtape curbs his protégé’s delight at humans dying in the war. Humans die regardless, and what matters is how a war or any other circumstance erodes our piety and related character. Crises also often prove to be a great excuse to succumb to self-righteousness and self-indulgence, often two sides of the same coin. Self-mortification, on the other hand, is a different coin of much greater value, but less often minted under stress.
So, what do we see online and even in the conversations in our churches? Is it a variation of self-righteousness that Screwtape delighted in, and Lewis described in his essay “Dangers of National Repentance?” (1940). What Lewis says about some young Anglican intellectuals in the late 1930s should warn us away from greater self-righteousness, and instead encourage greater self-mortification. As the world fell deeper into war, these young men demanded that England repent of its contribution to WW1 and the terms of its Armistice that contributed to WW2. Concern with one’s own sins was replaced by what Lewis insists is a supercilious bewailing of the sins of one’s neighbors. What masqueraded as repentance for self he revealed as condemnation of others. Lewis says that this condemnation involved ascribing to “our neighbor (even our Christian neighbor) . . . whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.” Suspicion of that evil encourages mass shaming of the public. So many people to accuse! So many sins of others to bewail!
Too many, both Right and Left, now seem bent on burning down their patrimony so that others may know how upset they are at others. The Left’s accusations are split: contemporary grifts directed by Matt Walsh’s foils in “Am I a Racist?” against living groups and “systems” created by the dead ones, or revisionist history like the 1619 Project targeting dead groups who founded the oppressing “systems.” The Right now directs wrath where Lewis said many of the young Anglicans did: Colonel Blimp and “the business-man.” Colonel Blimp was a satirical jingoistic cartoon that reminds one of crusading neocons sacrificing storehouses of blood and treasure post 9/11. John Bolton would be an excellent Colonel Blimp for 2024. The businessman, on the other hand, has evolved since Lewis’s time. He went from aloof oligarch in the 1930s to pedestrian managerialist, then to financialist (Jack Welch), and now finally to activist. See Jaguar’s new ad campaign that is Corporate Memphis incarnate; is this legacy company selling autos, paint, or mental illness?
But before we nod off to the dulcet tones of our criticism of these warmongers and DEI sycophants, what Lewis says of the “business-man” under judgment wakes us up: “I suspect that the latter usually means the [young critic’s] father, but that is speculation.” There’s no psychoanalysis on this point, let alone en masse, of course, but a warning that abstract social outrage may be little more than failing to keep the Fifth Commandment. The honest times of legitimate public repentance and self-examination in America, complete with prayer and political jeremiads, called us to repent our own sins, not the sins of others.
What Csák saw in America
The occasion for this reflection is János Csák’s The Genius of America. To be clear, the book itself did not prompt reflection because of its insight. I think that one could read a host of better books about America. The book is Csák’s own thoughts — and he is certainly entitled to them — often expressed through lengthy quotations chosen to summarize the American ethos. The book was originally published abroad, and for a foreign reader not familiar with many of the sources that American academic types are expected to know (e.g. Tocqueville, the Founders, etc.), the quotations selected may be enlightening.
Beyond this assembling of familiar ideas and quotations, with no attention paid to “the literature” or other rhetorical foils (an academic trope for sure, but nice for situating one’s place in an ongoing argument), and with a fairly pedestrian central point, the book struck me as a vanity project. It must be noted that Csák is a man of remarkable accomplishments, the kind of accomplishments that could make one either immune to vanity or entirely given to it. On the one hand, Aristotle’s Great Souled or Magnanimous man (Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b) seems quite vain to observers who have not sought and attained great honors themselves, and Csák has certainly sought and attained great honors. Perhaps he is the Great Souled or Magnanimous man? On the other hand, if one pursues honors which he has not deserved, he is vain. This prompts one to ask who deserves to write books about America, but if Ibram Kendi or Tim Alberta are, why not a man of Csák’s caliber?
Csák opens his book with the disorientation he felt at a museum in Connecticut in 2007 when he asked a guide about Indian migration from the area. He was told that the Indians had a different idea of the future. He considers this a sanitized answer that didn’t acknowledge what really happened, though he argues that all Americans think about is the future. Will economic and political crises change this, however? Csák perceives a crisis brewing, and he’s probably right. In the first of a series of long quotations (again, quotations making up much of the prose) he quotes Pierre Manent to say that France’s ruling class is an ideological class. As our own ruling class (Trump not withstanding) resembles those in Europe, what will save us from our own wave of ephemeral ideologies as we consider the future?
It’s a good question, but Csák’s answer too often stumbles over the recounting of systemic injustices in the past rather than diagnosis of ideologies marring the future. He doesn’t say “systemic,” but it is implied by the fact that he treats America as if it is just one big, giant moral agent committing injustices. These injustices are committed against Indians, Blacks, Hispanics, and even some whites, though this last injustice is never really explored in comparison with the rest. Somehow passing through the injustices, like Jesus in the Upper Room, is “a specifically American version of the universal genius.” Whatever could that mean? The answer, of course, is the genius of the Founders who gleaned from the usual checklist of influences: Greeks, Romans, the Bible, and “the Enlightenment.” (In the Afterword, Csák’s friend George Friedman says that Csák loves the Enlightenment as Thomas Jefferson did.). Of course, what Csák means by “the Enlightenment” is essentially some corner of it that was secular and French. These influences, he concludes, prepared the Founders to create a government that is somehow anachronistically dedicated to John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle or what Americans today might call the Night Watchman state. And it is Mill’s Harm Principle, Csák argues, that can build bridges (phew!) between believers in God’s Providence on the one hand and nihilists on the other (“those who believe that human existence can be attributed to a special coincidence of nature . . . no divine guidance . . . no particular interest in anything other than mundane subsistence and the continuation of the species”). Of course, because there was no significant immigration of nihilists recorded in the colonies, Csák is forced to dwell for a few pages on pious folks like Penn or Winthrop who actually made the colonies successful. But we all know that denominations are messy (atheism never is?), so Americans found the resolve and wisdom to adopt this most reductionist of political anthropologies and unite around their common utilitarian ambitions.
It is hard to imagine a more anachronistic reading of Early America. Yes, yes: Thomas Jefferson said that polytheists didn’t break his leg or pick his pocket. However, whoever your favorite Founder is cannot have his quotations made into the Founding writ large. It’s also time to stop reading atheism back into Early America; it existed only in small and shameful corners of the French Enlightenment, and no American much cared for or about the French Enlightenment. In fact, once Americans saw what the French Revolution was about, many of them turned on Jefferson out of the fear that he was one of them. Csák’s account is not unique, of course, but serves as a good example of just how much American intellectuals under their European tutors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forced false choices, vast imprecision, and two-dimensional histories.
Csák also addresses what he calls the theology of the United States. This theology is, not surprisingly, about rights and a moralism now reflexively called “Judeo-Christian.” Csák’s American theology saves us from atomistic, egoistic, materialistic, individualism while enabling a bland transcendent utilitarianism. Many of these arguments are claimed on the authority of (and extensive quotations from) Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville was part of a growing number of intellectuals in the nineteenth century who politely nodded to the deep piety of the Puritans as they were thrown into the furnace to fuel a new understanding of America. Tocqueville’s thoughts on religion in America reflected his own lukewarm European Catholicism that couldn’t comprehend how much Protestant political theology continued to shape the country, and Tocqueville was then largely forgotten in America until he was revived by Jacob-Peter Mayer in the early 20th century. Thanks to his Mayer’s dedicated translation of Tocqueville’s work and his related monograph Prophet of the Mass Age (1939), Tocqueville regained the attention of intellectual historians and political theorists, who have since recycled one another’s thoughts on him more than a pile of scrap metal. Tocqueville is certainly the best of the sociologists (whoso readeth, let him understand), however, and if undergrads are still reading his warnings against individualism while being prepared for today’s disposable careers of conformity and dependence, one hopes they will have the good sense to laugh out loud when Tocqueville is right and when he is wrong.
Well, “Whatever,” as the kids say, because it’s all downhill in Csák’s telling as the years roll on. The discordant Americans are once again brought together, however, not by their common utilitarian ambitions or bland moralisms, but by their mistreatment and genocide of everyone else — especially blacks, Indians, and anyone in the path of Manifest Destiny. After a short misplaced chapter on economic statistics, Csák revives a long indictment of slavery, the Mexican-American War, the dispossession of the Indians, etc. The latter expression is curious insofar as Csák asserts that the Indians did not believe in property. Nevertheless, the point remains. Csák blames what “America” did on a kind of cognitive dissonance in which Americans compartmentalized their ideals from a policy rooted in the belief might makes right. He then winds his argument down with a final inventory of American beliefs, or at least the root of them (again). Why he concludes this way isn’t clear, except perhaps to remind us that his great “takeaway” is that Americans have such potential if only they’d live by their own creed. Well, “ifs and buts,” candy and nuts and all that, right?
For the reader who made it this far, there remain some odd revelations. America, we learn, stands between Democrat inheritors of Puritans, Jacobins, and Marxists, and Republican inheritors of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and classical liberal ideas. It turns out that the same Puritans who wrote endlessly on our capacity for sinfulness, who advanced congregational government and the New England township, were in fact elites who believed in human perfectibility. It also turns out that Democrats are preoccupied with wealth equality, which is curious since they now control the highest-income congressional districts and counties, and the richest five percent of white voters are most likely to vote for Democrats. This is a stark reversal that didn’t require even a generation to happen. But one can forgive Csák for this 90s view of Democrats, since even the party hasn’t caught up with its own class realignment yet. Likewise, Csák’s emphasis on the “ability of the elite to comprehend the desired human goods and unity of order in a changing world” seems quaint in an era of populism. But he is right that there are two very different and tense tribes contending without a clear winner, Trump’s gains across all traditional Democrat constituencies notwithstanding.
Conservatives Learning the National Repentance Liturgy
Csák is also right that conservatives have made too many concessions to radical Marxists. Sadly, evidence of those concessions is on display in the endorsements and blurbs for The Genius of America. Patrick Deneen, who wrote the Foreword, sets it at the end of a long list of books by foreign observers including Tocqueville, Bryce, Chesterton, and commends Csák for his “keen” study of American history and manners. He excuses Csák’s perpetual attention to the American Indians because the Hungarians were preyed on by the Nazis and Soviets. This would make Americans Nazis and Soviets then, I suppose, or is it the other way around? We also get some recycled scrap about America’s Christian and Enlightenment inheritance, as if these could be forged into one solid chassis. Short endorsements come from Christopher Rufo (“This book is urgent and important”), Rod Dreher (“a love letter to America”), Larry Arnn (“possessing the practical judgment of the statesman and the historical knowledge of the academic”), Rick Santorum (“It must be added to the list of insightful books written by distant lovers of the American experiment), and Kevin Roberts (“a tour-de-force that ought to be widely read”).
What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here? I appreciate esteem for an accomplished man like János Csák, and I think I understand how the blurbing racket works, but how is it that those whom one expects to champion what is great in America, its virtues and vocations (Hillsdale, Heritage, etc.) abide what is often a concession to the national hand-wringing liturgy recounting the sins of abstract aggregates or the dead? Likewise, why endorse these recycled tropes of twentieth century historiography about the Enlightenment?
While Csák cannot be accused of national repentance because he isn’t an American, is America best understood as simply a case study in cognitive dissonance between ideals and practice, as if America is just one big ideal contrasted with one big practice? This is a foolish way to do history. Both history and the future are not a contest of ideals contending with one another, or idealists contending against pragmatists, but the actions of people whom one tries to understand in their own time and circumstances and hopefully judge charitably. The alternative is the kind of public outrage and shaming Lewis warns against. This can become quite absurd. I can remember a student telling me, in a hypothetical discussion of America in the 1850s, that she (!) would have readily abandoned her family in Illinois to bayonet someone in Alabama over slavery. This wasn’t even in the circumstance of preserving the union or Lee’s Maryland campaign. It was her way of asserting her own self-righteousness over the dead.
Should we encourage Americans to scorn their patrimony, or instead to treat their ancestors as men and women acting in good faith? Are we not similarly in the same human condition as them? Should all children judge their fathers this severely? What priest or prophet ever called people to repent for the dead? A more insightful study would acknowledge that politics is not about ideals, even when proposed as a balm to cover accusations against the past. For idealists, rather, there will always be disappointments because politics is not about abstractions. A politics of abstractions, whether Csák’s or anyone else’s, cannot sustain a polity. Life alone or together is not about resolving dissonance. It is about Lewis’s resolution to virtue and vocation, including charity for one’s fathers, and giving thanks for one’s patrimony however imperfect.
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If crises can being virtues, maybe we should seek a WW III with Russia to better ourselves. Then again, coming from both veterans and Chris Hedges, who was a war correspondent of around 20 years, war corrupts everyone involved.
Either we can think in all-or-nothing ways or we can reflect on ourselves and how, in comparison with others, we are a mix of good and bad. Perhaps those who complain about Post Modern criticisms of America should note why they are angry at Post Modernism’s contributions. Is it because, as Chris Hedges has said, at the heart of idolatry is self-worship. And so they can recognize the religious condemnation that Post Modernism preaches to them. What follows then is their defense of patrimony because they are thinking ow dare anyone condemn my freedom of religion.
Of course the previous paragraph demonstrates an all-or-nothing way of dealing with our past. But what if we were to honestly look at our own failures and sins, as well as those of our heroes, when looking at history. Doesn’t the Gospel with its forgiveness of sins empower us to freely look at our own faults as well as the faults of our heroes? That when compared to each other, the founders, like the rest of us, were a mix of good and bad. That both we have things to learn from them as well as have things to teach them. Such thinking allows us to learn from them without using too many pedestals. We should note that authoritarianism is reincarnated by the overuse of pedestals.
And so we come to patrimony with a challenge. We can neither accept nor reject all of patrimony. Perhaps we cannot accept or reject most of patrimony. I hope that that is what the above article is saying. But we should note something about looking at the injustices that have been suffered by others. Perhaps we should react to those injustices in the same way that we would react if those injustices happened to us. In other words, use the Golden Rule when viewing the injustices of the past. For without that approach, we only show ourselves to have passionately embraced tribalism and the moral relativity that comes with it: that what is good and evil depends on who does what to whom.