Tag Archives: liberty

Civilization and other Challenges

Posted on March 3, 2015 | 2 comments

703683I’ve had the privilege to help out with the beginnings of a new Center for Western Civilization, located in Berkeley, one block south of the University of California, on the corner of Durant and Bowditch. We hope to enrich the university curriculum with lectures reflecting the traditions of the West, those of ordered liberty, privileged and responsible freedom, elected government, open markets, habeas corpus, rule of law, jury trials. These ideals are our rightful inheritance, principles that reflect John Adams’ “government of laws, and not of men.” Laws protect; men dictate. 

These are principles not always found in required university curricula. It is also true that freedom of speech and religion is not respected on many college campuses, with the most egregious intolerance found in the cloistered halls of the Ivy League and in the lofty liberalism of our public universities, namely U. C. Berkeley.

There is a correlation between this rise of intolerance, with its enforcement by campus bullies, and our increasingly empty churches, according to Mary Eberstadt. In “From Campus Bullies to Empty Churches” (Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2015), she describes the peer and faculty pressure on students to deny their Christian faith, to consider such belief a fairy tale. Christianity is not acceptable in quad or classroom, and students want to fit in. Christians and their beliefs are ridiculed. Parents, beware of paying outrageous sums for such an education! Students, beware of going into debt for a lopsided program, to put it kindly. 

And so it has been of some concern to many of us that the pillars of our society are crumbling and those who might rebuild the foundations – the best and brightest of the next generation – are being stripped of their heritage, our legacy to the young. Today a counter-revolution composed of brave warriors who are unafraid of the bullies, unafraid of the speech police, is challenging faculty and tenure tracks, armed with support networks. These conservative groups, folks that want to conserve our ideals enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights, grow stronger each day. They need our support. 

Our Center for Western Civilization hopes to do just that. In these early days, we have connected with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), founded by Frank Chodorov in 1953 who saw the need for a fifty-year project to “revive the American ideals of individual freedom and personal responsibility… by implanting these ideals in the minds of the coming generations.” A young William F. Buckley Jr. was ISI’s first president. Since then they have held seminars and summer programs based on six major principles: limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, a free-market economy, and traditional values (i.e. Judeo-Christian). 

This past year ISI established a U. C. Berkeley group, the Burke Society, and we hope to work with them as well. We will also network with others on campus concerned about these vital issues. 

God seems to be writing with our crooked lines, hopefully straightening them. While every effort we have made has been fraught with difficulties and impossibilities, doors keep opening. We boldly walk through them, wondering what is on the other side.

In April we will sponsor our first lecture. David Theroux, Founder and President of the C. S. Lewis Society of California, will speak on “C S Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism.” Lewis was keenly aware of the threat of totalitarianism, having lived through two world wars and witnessed the rise of Hitler and Stalin. Our event has outgrown the planned venue and we are moving it to a larger one. 

All the while my little novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, considers these issues as well: the borders between wilderness and civilization, the effects of the sexual revolution on American culture, the dangers caused by a culture of narcissism and grievance, and the inclusivity that allows barbarians through our gates. It considers what defines us, who we are, for if we don’t know who we are, we don’t know where we are going. Our own history – that of America and the Western world – answers these questions, and it is to our founding fathers and mothers that we must turn. We cannot afford to look away, denying that the pillars are crumbling.

Some take exception to the label, Western civilization. Are we being ethnocentric? Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament representing South East England, calls Western civilization the “Anglosphere,” and this is a useful name, for it avoids the charge that we are speaking only of America and Western Europe. The Anglosphere – the free English-speaking peoples worldwide – has an important story to tell, and tell again and again, for as Hannan says, “the Anglosphere is why Bermuda is not Haiti. It’s why Singapore is not Indonesia. It’s why Hong Kong is not China (for now)… the individual is lifted above the collective. The citizen is exalted over the state; the state is seen as his servant, not his master.” (Intercollegiate Review)

Much has been written denigrating the history of the West. Corruption, crimes, misogyny, slavery, conquest, and many other dark moments are brought to light, judged, and sentenced, both secular and religious. But this has been true of every era; there will always be the good and the bad in human society. And so we make judgments about what is good and worth conserving. We choose the good and reject the bad.

The existence of these dark events and those who perpetrated them does not warrant rejecting the foundations of our culture. And so, for example, we look to Michelangelo, Dante, Shakespeare in the Renaissance. We want to recapture their “mimetic content” as Joseph A. Mazzeo writes, to pass it on to the next generation, and to enrich and fortify our own. Likewise we want to disregard the Medicis, Strozzis, della Roveres, and other dark Renaissance figures. We judge what makes our people great, good and free, and eventually we realize that the artists and writers and statesmen of the “Western Canon” (so abandoned in our schools) looked to their own history, to the Christ story for mimetic content, for they lived in a living tradition. In the story of Christ we find the origin of our ideals, our unique Western worldview. We find the sacredness of each individual regardless of class, gender, race, and religion, a revolutionary concept. And of course Christ lived and breathed within the Jewish tradition of law and faith.

We must not take our Anglosphere inheritance for granted. It is unique, precious, and under attack from within and without. The first battle that must be fought is on our university campuses. The second is in Washington D. C.

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Traditions and Arrangements

Posted on September 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

Writing ImageIt is Labor Day, a time to honor work, the working man and woman, those who contribute to our world with their time, talent, and the sweat of their brow. It is appropriately also a time to send our children to school to learn how to do this, how to use their lives productively, how to work and to become responsible for their hours and days. So I turn to one of my many labors, my novel-in-progress, hoping to one day carry it to full term and allow it to breathe.

In creating the back-story for one of my characters, I have revisited the huge topic, Western Civilization: what it is and do we want to preserve it, and if we do, how do we go about it?

I am a saver of cogent words, powerful words in print. I snip bits from newspapers and magazines. I file them, where they sleep until resurrected in a moment like this when I am constructing a novel, drawing the blueprint that will become a huge house of many rooms. I am an architect, I suppose, in the planning stages, building inch by inch, word by word, scribble by scribble. Each room is a character, and they meet from time to time in the house, rub shoulders, touch one another’s minds and hearts and souls with their hopes and fears and regrets. Some rooms are dark, some light, some warm, some cold. They are all under the roof of my little novel, linked by halls and doorways and stairs.

The bits and pieces snipped and saved, ideas that will flow into these rooms are expressed by many ponderers from the English-speaking world. They voice concern, and rightly so, that without the Judeo-Christian underpinning of Western culture, the free world will collapse. One doesn’t have to be religious to worry about this… one merely has to face the reality of such a loss and how it would affect, at the very least, our ideas of liberty, law, and democracy.

Thomas Jefferson’s words decorate his memorial in Washington, D.C.:

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

Jefferson, a skeptic, is referring to slavery, but these words could have been written today. We all wonder, believers and skeptics, whether our liberties can be secure when we remove the author of the liberties, and when we remove the idea that these freedoms are gifts not rights.

Peggy Noonan writes that there are reasons for traditions and arrangements, some are good, some not so good, ways of doing things learned from experience. These ways have also risen from religious roots. Through the centuries since the birth of Christ, the West, under the influence of the Judeo-Christian social philosophy, has organized life based on the belief that God exists, that he loves and desires us to love, that he made man to be a free, thinking, creative being that would respond to him in turn, freely, thinking, and creatively. Behind the rule of law, behind our institutions of family, church, government, and free press, supporting our right to organize our workers, to gather in peaceful assembly, even behind our table manners and Robert’s Rules of Order, lies the Judeo-Christian definition of man and his purpose. So there are reasons for our traditions and arrangements in the Western world; there are reasons we labor to protect them.

The traditions and arrangements have changed from time to time, tweaked here and there, discarded here and restored there, fought over, around, and within, in word and in deed. Slavery challenges and condemns us, in the Classical world, among African tribes, and on American plantations. Today a child in the womb is seen by some to be owned by the mother, the unborn having no rights. Across the world, children are bought and sold, trafficked for labor, sex, surrogacy. Women are in bondage, jailed, beheaded. Believers are martyred. We see these things, we judge them to be right or wrong, and we labor to change them. So there are times when we need to alter traditions and arrangements to better reflect the Judeo-Christian definition of man and his congress with one another. But without the ideal, the standard by which to judge, how can we decide, act, affect the real world?

It is a conundrum, for our ideals of respect and liberty prevent coerced belief, even if belief may be necessary to uphold that liberty. So folks speak of a public square where we honor these ideals and seek common ground to move forward. They say we must reflect before deserting traditional definitions of marriage and family, that is, a man and a woman raising their own children. These arrangements have held and continue to hold society together. Studies show that the father is more committed, the mother more protected, the child more loved, when this traditional view is encouraged by government representing society. There is less delinquency and fewer single parent households.

I believe in the author of this code of life, this Judeo-Christian God, so it is easy for me to believe in these traditions and arrangements. I believe there will be a judgment (perhaps it’s ongoing) – a reckoning not only I will face but the world as well. We reap what we sow.

But I also pray that those who do not share my belief in that God, consider embracing his traditions and arrangements that have been honed through the centuries. If skeptics value liberty and the rule of law, respect for gender and race, care for the poor and handicapped, the unborn and the aged, if they desire freedom of thought, speech and worship, they would be wise to support the institutions that uphold these Western ideals.

I suppose the world is much like my blueprint for the mansion with the many rooms. Every person is different, unique, but together we have a common humanity. We share the earth and we share a long history. We live under the same roof of suns and moons and stars. We meet in common areas to agree upon traditions and arrangements, but we must build on those of the past, rather than begin anew each time. We nail and we hammer, we add here and pull away there, but we must consider why we do what we do and what we shall lose if we don’t. We must not forget how we arrived at this place, in this time, and why the rooms were decorated and arranged just so, before we tear them down. We must recall, if we are graced with belief, who labored to create this great house, our world, and that he calls us to love one another as he has arranged for us to love.

And it’s good to remember President Jefferson’s words, that our liberties are gifts from God our creator, and be thankful.

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The Land of the Free

Posted on July 7, 2014 | Leave a comment

american-flag-2a2As I watched the children running through the grass, clutching strings tied to red and blue and white balloons, I was thankful once again to be an American, to live in this land of the free. The burgers were grilling, the buns waiting to be slathered with mustard and catsup. Folks mingled and chatted, then scooted onto wooden picnic benches. It was our annual church picnic, enjoyed this year on Fourth of July weekend.

And so far, the last I heard, we are still the land of the free. As I watched the children, I thought as I often do, how law protects us, allowing these children to run with such abandon and joy. I then recalled a few lines from the movie A Man for All Seasons, where Sir Thomas More challenges the thinking of his son-in-law Will Roper:

Roper:  So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More:  Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper:  I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More:  Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Our national Independence Day is a time to reflect on who we are as Americans, the stuff we are made of, the values for which we fight, suffer, and die. And while freedom from tyranny comes to mind, considering how our fledgling family of thirteen colonies protested British taxation, I usually return to the principle of law and order, something we happily inherited from British common law.

We have inherited a great deal from Britain in spite of our young rebellion over two hundred years ago: language, literature, philosophy and religion; traditions, secular and sacred; the desire for monarchy as seen in our icons, political and cultural; freedom of speech, especially in the media, freedom of thought and belief; the rights of property and families and individuals.

On July 4, 1776, in the “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America” we held certain truths to be self-evident: that all men were created equal, that God has given them the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments derive their power from the people, from the consent of the governed. And so to guarantee these truths, to protect the great heritage we received from Britain, and to thus ensure a peaceful democracy, the young union of States constituted a body of law.

Our nation would have not survived, will not survive, without the rule of law. Without laws, we, like young Roper, would have no protection from tyranny in all its forms, in all areas of our national life.

But changing the law is a tedious process. Perhaps this is wise, helping to ensure good laws. But we are a nation of do-ers, and we become impatient. We march with banners and placards year after year before the White House or the Supreme Court or Capitol Hill to challenge a 1973 law considered immoral and deadly not only to the individual and the unborn, but to our cultural climate as well. Killing the innocent, some of us cry, begets more killing of the innocent. Please change this law, we say with our signs and heartfelt tears.

We look to government to lead us and to govern with our consent. We demand they too be law abiding, knowing that if our governors are corrupt, so will be their governing. We demand of them what the law demands of us.

Internationally we are the saviors of the world. Immigrants throng to and over our borders, determined to touch and taste America, scrabbling over fences, tunneling under boundaries. Confident in America’s salvation, they give away their children, hoping they will have will have a better life, a peaceful life, or simply life itself. They are desperate, for they see us and other Western nations, as we truly are, the bearers of law and order, the protectors of freedom, the guarantors of peace.

And yet, they too must realize somewhere deep within that to break the law is to break America. To loosen and lessen, bend and broaden without the consent of the people is to invite disorder. And disorder leads to anarchy which demands, even welcomes, the bully, the tyrant, the one who promises to restore order, at a price. In America, these immigrants know as do we, that cutting ahead in line is unfair, simply wrong. And Americans are fair; they desire to right the wrongs.

So this year, this Fourth of July, 2014, I am thankful our nation is still undivided and that we still form a more perfect union, even if imperfect. I am thankful that our separation of powers (Congress, Courts, Presidency) though threatened, may right itself in the future. I am thankful that outrage may still be penned, if penned respectfully (with due regard to libel and slander), that the press’s freedoms are not always misused, that debate and dissent still breathes (although barely) in our land. I am especially thankful for the courageous men and women who fight for us, for our freedoms.

I am glad that God is not dead as has been pronounced, and that respect for all beliefs is honored if not always practiced.

I’m glad, too, that I for one do not take America for granted. I see her as exceptional, enlightened, and great. The rest of the world sees her this way, as a shining light that will not go out, a beacon on a hill. She may not be perfect, but she values life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She rules with the consent of her people, a nation of rules that protects dissent as well.

And now as I write, I see in my mind (and my heart) the children running freely through the grass, their colorful balloons flying high.

Happy Birthday, America.

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Thanksgiving for Families

Posted on November 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

It has been said that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. We don’t always get along with our siblings, our parents, our children. But we know they will always be our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Family bonds, however fragile, bear stress better than other bonds, but even these can break when hearts are broken.

Just so, we speak of our parish family, using similar words. Here too, the bonds are stronger than friendship, or perhaps different than friendship, more like family bonds. Common beliefs run deep like underground rivers, not always seen, but necessary to the watering of roots. As sacramental Christians, we believe that when we partake of God at his altar, he unites us with one another, past and future. God joins us, and he enjoins us to love one another in a special way. He enjoins us to invite all and everyone into this holy family. All are invited to his table; we are siblings, with one God the Father and one Mother the Church.

And like biological families, we do not always get along. Sometimes I think that because the belief and altar bonds are so deep we trespass on kindness, we assume assent and approval. We might push one another too far, for we sense things will all sort themselves out in time. I hear many such stories of other parishes, and witness such events in our own parish life. Because we love one another, we are close, and because we are close we have more to gain and more to lose, just like a natural family. Our hearts and souls are exposed for all to see.

We are all in training for Heaven, to sing with the family of God and the angels, the white-robed martyrs and the great prophets and apostles, with our ordinary, extraordinary brothers and sisters who have made the journey ahead of us. Our time on earth is a testing time, a time of trial and formation, of growth, of sanctification.

Ideally, within the natural family we learn discipline and delayed gratification. We learn to look out for one another. We learn work habits – beginnings, middles, and finishings. We learn to pass the potatoes and share a meal with one another. We learn to converse, to lace words into phrases so that we can touch the person alongside, to bring our minds and hearts together for a brief moment, like dancing. We learn the liturgy of the family, the morning rising and breakfasting and heading out for work and school, the coming together in the evening, lighting a supper candle, holding hands and saying grace, the washing up, the struggling through homework, the shared moments of recreation in the time left, the evening prayers, the slipping into sleep. It is a dance in which we never lose touch never let go of one another, as we follow the notes and the rhythm of family life. We learn to love by learning the law of love – the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not murder, lie, steal, covet; thou shalt honor God, honor parents, honor husband and wife. The law of love is straightforward, simple. The law of love is crucial, the center of the Cross.

In this daily dance we may not always get along, but the rituals pull us through anger and frustration, through selfishness, greed, envy, and other mishaps of our souls. We might fight with one another, spar, test, lash out or “vent” as is said today (as though we were machines), but with God’s grace, we apologize, we make amends by amending ourselves in humility, by repenting and reforming, by turning around. The family, hopefully, teaches us how to do this, or tries to, and in this daily hymn of life, we school our children to be part of larger families: the community, the town, the nation, the world. 

So we give thanks this Thanksgiving not only for families but for our national family, for the United States of America. We give thanks for this incredible experiment in democracy. Earlier this month we gave thanks for those who fought for our country to preserve her freedoms. Now we give thanks for those who founded her, who birthed her. 

Will America need to be re-found, re-born? Will she survive these challenging times? Will she crumble as the family crumbles under the weight of easy divorce, easy sex, easy abortion, easy love? Without the school of the family, this remarkable training ground in the law of love, will we find ourselves in a wilderness, a wild-ness, a human jungle in which an elderly woman is punched out by a heartless teen or a tourist is shot for the fun of it, a jungle in which girls and boys die from binge drinking, drugs, and Internet bullying, in which babies are slaughtered, thrown out, before they breathe their first breath?

As Americans, our beliefs in freedom run deep like a river, unseen, assumed and unquestioned. Do we take these freedoms for granted? Do we exercise our rights without considering the accompanying responsibilities that support those rights? Are our American roots in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, roots that tap the deep waters of freedom of speech and religion – are these roots shriveling underground and unseen? Are we paying attention to their dying?

This Thanksgiving week, as we gather together the fragments of of our families, those from near and far, those members whom we like and those whom we don’t, we give thanks for this a-gathering, in church and at home, before altars and hearths. We give thanks for our freedom to gather in the squares and legislatures of our land. We give thanks for law and order, such as it is. We give thanks for family life that trains us for participation in a greater American life. 

And we pray that we, a nation founded under God, will preserve and protect those institutions that water liberty and a love for one another: the family and the church.

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On Liberty and Equality for All

Posted on July 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

Peggy Noonan writes today in the Wall Street Journal about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and its upcoming 150th anniversary in November. The Gettysburg Address is short, only three paragraphs and two minutes long, given at Gettysburg Cemetery for those who died in the then-ending Civil War, but it is said to be the most famous speech in the history of our country if not the West. Evidently President Lincoln wrote it out, corrected it once, then delivered it with Biblical cadences and phrasing. He was not the main speaker that day and was expected to say little, deferring to the lead orator. History proved otherwise, at least in importance. 

Ms. Noonan writes of this because, of course, it is the week of our nation’s birthday when we reflect on our innocent origins and giant ideals. It is a time when we as Americans consider from where we have come, where we are today, and where we are heading. We consider liberty and equality and the health of the Union. In 1863, at the close of the terrible war against slavery that divided our country, brother against brother, equality for all became the rallying cry for the North. Slavery of any kind denies equality and liberty. No one has the right to own another. In the course of the history of man, Caucasians have been enslaved, Asians have been enslaved, Africans have been enslaved, all owned as though they were products, as though they had no unalienable rights, no human dignity. These tragedies cry out to us, from Roman galleys to southern plantations.

So today, we say, there is no slavery. But many disagree, saying the unborn are the slaves of our modern world. Since 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled in essence that a woman owned the child within her, the unborn became slaves. And this ruling continues to be the law of the land, allowing women to own innocent Americans, to have the power of life and death.

Today a civil war rages in the hearts, minds, and bodies of our citizens. The divide is deep and is similar to the nineteenth-century Civil War we recall this autumn of 2013. I do not know what the outcome of today’s civil war will be, but I cry for our country so divided.

And like many others in many other times in history, I pray for an end to this slavery. I pray for every American to be equal under the law, from the moment of conception, for we are meant to be a nation of liberty and equality for all. And as Abraham Lincoln said, such a war is a test “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure… “

Can we long endure? Many have died in this cause, millions aborted each year, mothers shattered by grief, fathers mourning their lost children, grandparents never knowing their grandchildren. The count rises. President Lincoln’s words ring true for us today:

“…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

As an American, on this 237th birthday of Independence, I resolve this too.

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