SOBRAN'S -- The Real News of the Month April-May 2006 Volume 12, Number 4-5 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $44.95 per year. For special discounted subscription offers and e-mail subscriptions see www.sobran.com, or call the publisher's office. Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-513-5053. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue. {{ MATERIAL DROPPED OR CHANGED SOLELY FOR REASONS OF SPACE APPEARS IN DOUBLE CURLY BRACKETS. EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS" SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }} CONTENTS Features -> Unknown Unknowns -> Publisher's Note -> On Fatherhood -> The Fog -> Joe Sobran Turns Sixty The Sobran Forum -> Otto Scott, 1919-2006 (by Phillipa Scott-Girardi Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives) "Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue FEATURES Unknown Unknowns (page 1) When President Bush confirmed that he'd authorized the National Security Agency to conduct an enormous secret program to monitor Americans' telephone calls, as reported in USA TODAY, I assumed that this remarkably unpopular president had finally taken a fatal step too far. Now the American public, already revolted by this administration's blunders, crimes, lies, scandals, domestic surveillance, deficits, et cetera, would roar "Enough!" It soon appeared not. In fact, a poll the day after the story appeared found that most Americans, including many who generally disapprove of Bush's job performance, accepted the program as a legitimate "national security" measure to contain terrorism. As Bush told it, no laws were broken, the Constitution wasn't violated, no calls were wiretapped without court orders. The NSA was merely studying =patterns= of phone calls in the records of three major phone companies (a fourth refused to cooperate). Innocent people, in short, had nothing to fear. A huge, shadowy government agency, known to most of us only by its initials (not to be confused with the National Security Council, mark you), was merely exercising, without telling us, another power we didn't know about. That power isn't authorized by the Constitution, but it isn't forbidden by it either, and the U.S. Supreme Court has permitted similar things in the past, under certain conditions, which are being scrupulously observed by the NSA. Possible abuses aren't worth worrying about. Big government is just a wee bit bigger than we knew, that's all. But then, we're also more secure than we knew. No telling how many terrorist plots the NSA has foiled! And no telling how much it has cost the taxpayer to collect untold volumes of useless information. But that's not for us to know either. As long as most of us support our government, that's what counts. And of course we do support it, without knowing quite what it is now. We are assured it's a democracy, responding to our needs (as it defines them) and under our control. What? Your civics teacher didn't explain this to you? Well, the old civics books may be a little out of date. As Donald Rumsfeld has explained, there are some things about our enemies that are known, and some that are unknown, and the latter can be further broken down into the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. I suppose the same is true about our rulers. We know a lot about what they do, and we also realize that a lot more than we know is concealed from us. In the case of the NSA it happens that some of the unknown unknowns have come to light. But countless unknowns remain. The film UNITED 93 is being hailed for showing and celebrating the courage of the passengers on a hijacked airliner on September 11, 2001, who immediately fought back against the terrorists. But who will fight back against those who have hijacked our country? Publisher's Note (page 2) Dear Reader, This month's issue is double the size of a regular SOBRAN'S -- twice the size and I hope twice the treat for fans of Joe Sobran. This combination April-May issue contains two timeless classics: "The Fog" from the CENTER JOURNAL (Summer 1982); and "On Fatherhood" from HUMAN LIFE REVIEW (Spring 1978). Twelve of Joe's recent "Reactionary Utopian" columns are also inside. With this issue we introduce a new feature, "The Sobran Forum." Joe Sobran and the newsletter lost a good friend in May. Otto Scott, a distinguished writer and eloquent speaker, died just shy of his 89th birthday. We are printing an article in "The Sobran Forum" by his daughter Phillipa, who told us that Otto used to send her copies of SOBRAN'S with key passages underlined. I am happy to report that Otto returned to his Catholic faith in the final weeks of his life, receiving the Last Rites of the Church. You can expect the unexpected in SOBRAN'S, and count on something extra each time we appear in your mailbox. This month, I am pleased to announce the release of our newest publication: REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME: CONFESSIONS OF A REACTIONARY UTOPIAN. This booklet has hundreds of pithy quotes from Joe that appeared in SOBRAN'S over the past five years -- several are featured throughout this very special issue. REGIME CHANGE is available at =no= charge for all renewals to SOBRAN'S. It is a sequel to ANYTHING CALLED A "PROGRAM" IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL: CONFESSIONS OF A REACTIONARY UTOPIAN (now out of print). It fits easily into a shirt pocket or a purse and can be a welcome gift to a fellow traveler or serve as a treasure trove of opinions to annoy your left- (and right-) wing friends. Welcome! Welcome to our new subscribers! We are in the midst of a subscription drive and have recruited many new readers. Perhaps you would like to sign up a friend or colleague now and take advantage of the special offers we are giving for new subscribers? See the enclosed "Gift Subscription" flyer for details. If you are looking for a lively speaker, why not consider booking Joe Sobran? He recently was a panelist in a forum in Washington, D.C. And he traveled to Michigan to give two talks and do a TV appearance for John Mangopolous's program, THE BATTLE OF IDEAS. Every month there are important enclosures in SOBRAN'S, including renewal notices and special items on sale. Other timely announcements can be found at our website: www.sobran.com. In addition to a subscription drive, we are engaging in a fundraising campaign to raise much-needed funds to further the ideas and influence of this inspirational newsletter. I hope you will consider a donation to SOBRAN'S to help us grow. Above all, can I count on your prayers for Joe Sobran's success and that of the newsletter? Thanks for being a loyal reader of SOBRAN'S! Sincerely, [signature] Fran Griffin Correction: In the February SOBRAN'S in an article on the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, the phone number listed was incorrect. One can reach the Foundation by writing to P.O. Box 270, Vienna, VA 22183; e-mail: FGF@vacoxmail.com; 703-242-0058; toll-free line: 1-877- 726-0058. Visit the new website for information on the Foundation's first book, SHOTS FIRED: SAM FRANCIS ON AMERICA'S CULTURE WAR, at www.shotsfired.us. On Fatherhood (pages 3-7) Tocqueville observed that the American father enjoyed less respect than his European counterpart, and it is commonplace that American popular drama depicts Father as a comical and somewhat feckless figure. To be sure, there is a great deal of affection for this father, and for life with him. Tocqueville thought that on the whole the American family was a healthy thing, and he thought the informality between fathers and sons allowed a degree of warmth less easy to achieve in Europe. Perhaps nothing separates us from the older European experience so much as this. Our own ancestors might sing of the "Faith of Our Fathers," but that kind of veneration is difficult for us to feel toward =our= fathers. It is hard for most of us even to imagine the awe formerly inspired by patriarchs -- Abraham, King Lear, Old Karamazov are nearly as alien to us as Confucius. Patronyms -- Odysseus Laertides, Nikita Sergeivitch -- are all but incomprehensible. A last name among us is not a symbol of tribal identity, any more than a first name is an honorific link with a patron saint. Pop Freudianism had a great vogue here, but Oedipal theory never had much resonance: the typical American father problem is not an oppressive atavistic presence brooding over the weak psyche, but simply the absence of the father. American boys are supposed to be trained for independence. This is making a virtue of necessity. They are going to be independent anyway. By their mid teens they are too mobile and, often, too wealthy to be controlled. What can the American father threaten to do to his disobedient son? Precious little -- for there is little he can withhold. Fathers may be important formative influences, but they are not terribly important as sources of identity and status. The American father bequeaths no title, no tribal authority, and very little property. We are a nation of self-made men, and most sons can acquire much more than they have any prospect of inheriting. Moreover, we have no powerful tribal traditions to speak of. Social authority is, as the sociologists say, bureaucratized, rationalized, made abstract and functional. Genealogy does not connect us to any fount of sacredness. There is little motive to revere a father, or any other human being: the very words "reverent" and "pious" are apt to be a bit derisive; to call a book "irreverent" is to recommend it, not to censure it. We worry very little about what our ancestors might have thought about us: we fear the judgment not of our fathers, but of our children; not of the past, but of the future. This has given a strange new meaning to the word "history." The admonitory rhetorical question we ask ourselves is now something like "What will history say?" Conservative societies worry about betraying a heritage: a liberal one worries about betraying a hypothetical future. The sense that the nature of things is not fixed and can be remade inevitably changes our conception of everything, including time. The past ceases to be something to be cherished and commemorated; tradition becomes "the dead hand of the past," rather than something in which we jointly participate with antecedents and posterity. Continuity no longer is felt as a moral and metaphysical urgency. Conventional presumptions become disreputable prejudices. A holiday becomes an occasion of indulgence rather than of holiness; as when we shift an honored president's birthday for our convenience. After all, the whole idea of honoring something is that we are willing to be inconvenienced by the duty of paying our respects: and by decreeing that Washington was born on a Monday we really cease to honor him. The point of all this is not to condemn the changes, but simply to point out that they have occurred, and that they have resulted in certain losses, which may or may not be justified by the gains. One way or the other, we should be conscious of what we are doing and undergoing. Margaret Mead has pointed out that the capacity for childbearing gives women a built-in social role, while a corresponding role must be invented for men. For women, as Freud notoriously remarked, "biology is destiny"; while men, in Sartre's phrase, are "condemned to be free." Motherhood is a biological role, and every society has it, but fatherhood is a social role which every society must reinvent. As a result, there are great variations in male roles. Some primitive societies don't even recognize that copulation is the cause of reproduction, and the role of men varies accordingly. Our society increasingly repeals the causal link between coitus and birth, and this too has changed the meaning of sex -- and the experience of what it means to be either a man or a woman. Women too are free now; whether condemned or privileged to be free, free they are. The conventions of fatherhood have enormously intricate consequences. In most societies the paternal line has been the source of the individual's (which is to say the individual man's) rank. Military and economic achievement have been the main modes of achieved rank, but even these achievements have usually proved to some extent hereditary. Men have often been able to claim glory by tracing themselves back to some glorious ancestor -- even a god. Lines of descent have at times loomed large even in egalitarian America, particularly in New England -- where, ironically, an "upstart" line like the Kennedys has now been transmuted into an aristocracy. Not only honor, but disgrace may be attached to bloodlines. Bastardy has been a matter of shame in many societies -- mostly, I think, in middle-class societies, where it has been uncommon, thanks to a broad and universally applied standard of sexual morality to which all are expected to conform. In aristocratic societies, where ranks vary widely and there are sexual as well as other social privileges, it is treated more matter-of-factly. And where rank is hereditary, as Samuel Johnson noted, it is accepted on all sides as accidental without strong moral implications. A nation of self-made men tends to be a moralistic nation. More accurately, it tends to be moralistic about individuals rather than about classes. Americans tend to resist the idea of making judgments about classes, because they like to deny that classes really exist. This means not only social and economic strata, but tribes, races, and, in a sense, even sexes. In the quasi-official American ideology, only individuals -- "citizens" -- really exist, and the model of free and equal citizens supplants collectivities in law and manners. There are no "superiors" here, except functionally; and increasingly we address even our bosses by their first names, signifying the essential national camaraderie. It is generally overlooked that the great American institution is the individual. Of course it is odd to talk this way, but that it because we don't think this way: the individual, for us, is not an institution, but an irreducible fact, isn't he (or she)? But the individual is always a physical fact without necessarily being a locus of morals and rights. Other societies demand the subordination of the individual to any number of other things: for most of the human race the individual has been only a component of larger social realities, and one by no means sanctified with individual rights of religious freedom, free speech, unlimited sexual freedom, and so forth: the degree of freedom enjoyed has always been a function of rank. In many ways, of course, this is still true even in America, a fact that is a source of endless scandal to mainline egalitarians. And so we abound in leveling crusades with respect to race, wealth, sex, and age. One philosopher, Peter Singer, has argued for a kind of equality for animals; though, like those who lowered the voting age, he has been forced to draw the line at shrimps. Race and fatherhood Let us consider what in America has become an especially touchy matter: race. Since the nineteenth century, with the rise of biological and anthropological inquiry, race theory has become naturalistic, and the concept of race has been broadened and magnified. Earlier, however, a race was merely a sort of figure of speech, so that Dr. Johnson could refer casually to "the race of writers." This made sense when the term meant, loosely, a line of descent, including an inherited status and occupation. In earlier times, a "race," in this sense, was a narrow thing, much like a tribe or a nation (from "natus," born). It meant something you belonged to by birth. A Roman dignitary might trace his ancestry to a god. The Hebrews traced theirs to Abraham. Aristocrats had proud pedigrees. This kind of membership in a larger ancestral group carried with it religion, culture, whatever social authority one had, and ascribed traits -- positive traits in the eyes of members, mostly negative ones in the eyes of outsiders, so that tribal or racial cohesiveness had functions it no longer has for most of us. The racial prejudices we frown on had their uses too -- largely defensive, since life depended to a great extent on group survival. As Margaret Mead has observed, the fear of miscegenation reflects a sense of the precariousness of intricate cultural patterns. It also reflects the unsophisticated perceptions of tribes which, looking outward, see nonmembers as animal, subhuman, because they lack the ritual competence (in Erving Goffman's phrase) of members: competence, that is to say, in the cultural ways of the group, which the group itself erects as its measure of humanity. We now term this "ethnocentrism," but it would be unwise to adopt a posture of simple condescension to it, since it is based on the insight that the capacity for cultural participation is the mark of humanity. Ethnocentrism, properly speaking, means supposing that there is only one test (that of one's own culture) for this capacity. So even racial prejudices reflect a positive and genuine conservative impulse: the desire to maintain the integrity of tribal modes. In simpler times there was a certain point in assuming that members of other races were threats to this integrity: it was often a simple fact. With the rise of individualism and the ideal of citizenship, however, prejudices of this kind became obsolete as safeguards, and became merely negative prejudices "against" rather than obverse of group loyalty. Pluralism began by assimilating all groups, so long as they ceased affronting each other with open claims of superiority and exclusive privilege. Humanity ceased being composed largely of "barbarians," "foreigners," "savages," and "goyim," and became the "human race." The very word "humanity" came to mean something positive, an equal-opportunity race, universal, with open admissions. Everyone was a member; nobody could =not= be a member. The jealous and sacred conditions of group membership became discreditable "barriers." Hereditary blessings became unfair "accidents of birth." In a sense, Hitlerism was a desperate and monstrous last stand for genealogical triumphalism: hence the violence of its appeal and opposition at a historical watershed. What all this means is that fatherhood -- and by extension descent -- no longer confers authority. One's line no longer vouchsafes special dignity or access to truth; no longer commands loyalty; is no longer a legitimate source of pride. One may be "proud of his heritage," but that really means that he needn't be ashamed of it, rather than that he may vaunt himself above others on account of it. And as social welfare undertakes the material responsibilities for child care, the old necessity for fathers is considerably weakened. Feminism and individualism If lineage, particularly on the father's side, is no longer sacred, there is no obvious reason why fathers should have special authority regarding children. A new verb, "parenting," expresses the desexing of parental roles. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of how far the father has fallen is the fact that it is now unnecessary for a woman to obtain the consent of her child's father before having it aborted -- no matter whether she is married or not. Many feminists hold that she has no obligation to inform him of her decision to abort. Apart from the question whether the child has any rights, this raises a question of justice concerning the father. Assume that abortion is perfectly justified in every case: does it follow that the man should be obliged to support a child whose very existence is no longer his responsibility? Is the decision that he shall be compelled to subsidize a biological accident to be made by someone other than himself? The answer to these questions is by no means obvious, though ceteris paribus, it would seem that he should have some say, if not over whether a woman undergoes an elective abortion, then over the consequences to himself. There is at least an obvious inconsistency between holding that a fetus is merely part of a woman's body, hers to dispose of at will, and holding simultaneously that her will may impose on him the obligation to act as if it were partly =his= body. Grant that she may control her own body; may she also control his? Should her biology be his destiny? She is free to abort; what is he free to do? So far the autonomy of the woman in this area seems not to coexist with an equal autonomy for the man: his succumbs and falls into the orbit of hers. Apparently the feminists would say to the man what anti-abortionists have said to the woman: "You should have controlled your own body at the critical moment; having failed to do so, you must pay the natural consequence." The woman decides, not only whether she shall be a mother, but whether he shall be a father. By depositing a small quantity of semen he has to a degree subjugated himself to her will. All kinds of counterarguments are conceivable; but they come oddly from the kind of individualist credo that justifies feminism and especially the right to abort in the first place. If the fetus has no individual value beyond what the mother chooses to give it, then the father evidently should have no more responsibilities than he has rights. He is otherwise in almost the opposite position from the Roman paterfamilias, who had discretion to kill even a full-grown child without legal penalty. Whatever such a system may be called, it is not one of individual liberty. As so often happens, the new feminism has gone from demanding equal rights to demanding special prerogatives; in a word, privileges. Of course all demands for privilege in modern America are made in the name of equality, and especially in the name of rectifying past wrongs, but that hardly means that what is demanded is not privilege. In an odd way, the new feminism represents not only the flowering of individualism, but even, in some respects, the resurgence of tribalism. Feminists nowadays are in the habit of talking as if women's suffrage and other rights had been wrested from men by force. But this is hardly plausible. It was, after all, men who voted to let women vote. Nor was this an act of sheer magnanimity (or chivalry) on the part of men. Women's suffrage was resisted by as many women as men (as the Equal Rights Amendment is), because it was rightly perceived not so much as a shift of half the political power from one sex to the other, as a fundamental alteration in the principle of social organization. Previously men had been the legal heads of families, even if few of them had any great social stature outside the family. It was the father who, like the shadow of the tribal paterfamilias, voted on behalf of the family, as its virtual representative in public affairs. The reason women were given the vote was not that people decided that men were violating women's rights and interests; if men had been conspiring against women with any determination, after all, they would hardly have chosen to enfranchise them. The real reason was that it was generally felt to be a kind of indignity to women as free and rational adults for them to be represented by others, even their own husbands. And a man who voted to let his wife vote did not consider that he was freeing her from his bondage; he thought that he was simply honoring her individuality. The sexes were not at war, and there were no demands for reparations in the form of "affirmative action." Such notions of sex as a relevant factor in public life were actually being filtered out: women's suffrage was a modernizing movement, an act of "differentiation" that separated biological identity from political identity. The "little woman" became a full-fledged "citizen." This is an important distinction between the old feminism and the new kind, which tends to emphasize sexual identities to the detriment of men. The old was Protestant and individualist, abstracting political "souls" from feminine bodies. The new, while still driven by many of the same ideals, also has a more Jewish flavor, and hence a quasi tribalism. Even the epithet "pig," never a typical symbol in Protestant invectives (except Milton's) expresses this element. Nor are collective derogations in the Protestant mode. Catholic women too (especially disaffected Catholics) are in evidence; like Jewish women, many of them have a generalized resentment against men and the subjection of women to the role of childbearers. Big families are disappearing in America: people of all three faiths now regard familial satisfactions as less important than individual ones. It takes considerable nerve, bordering on gall, to insist that sexual intercourse -- what Catholic moral theology calls "the conjugal act," because it constitutes the sacrament of matrimony -- must be "ordered to procreation." To say such a thing is to blaspheme against that American god, the individual. Individualism and independence It is not mere flippancy or derision to speak of the individual as a "god." This does not mean that the individual has any supernatural powers, merely that he is a locus of value, an "ultimate term" in our rhetoric (to use Richard Weaver's phrase). Many of the forceful terms in our public discourse refer to the model of the freely choosing individual: autonomy, self-determination, liberation, and so forth. In this sense we might say that sexual intercourse is now, so to speak, "ordered to autonomy," to the "fulfillment" of the participating individuals. Some would say that we are merely hedonistic -- that sex is really ordered to pleasure. But this would be to oversimplify, because pleasure too is ordered to, and justified in terms of, autonomy. It is not the rise of women that has weakened paternal authority, but the rise of the individual. If men wanted full power over women and children, they could probably have it. But, on the contrary, they have systematically -- and for the most part willingly -- forsaken it; because they recognize the principle of autonomy as sovereign; as universal; as their own. Accepting it, they have accepted the consequences. Men qua men have abdicated. Nobody has forced them to do so; the fact needn't be deplored, but it should be acknowledged, along with the reason they have abdicated. It has been virtually a religious process, a progressive subordination of traditional male authority to a charismatic principle. And of course many people think that men themselves are better off for the changes. America has a long tradition of declarations of independence, and few Americans want to be George III. This has meant a long succession of social fissions in the name of liberty (under whatever synonym). But finally the governing principle (what Weaver calls the "tyrannizing image") has been the individual. In America even collectivity movements, if they are to gain a large following, must appeal to individualism. The anti-abortion movement itself has adopted the language of individual rights rather than the terminology of the "integrity of the conjugal act" that one would expect if, as its foes insist, it were a "reactionary" Catholic movement. The notion that one's individual being may inhere in larger social bodies, or that one must subordinate himself to an order of reality larger than the individual self, is increasingly hard for Americans even to grasp, let alone take seriously. Even the science of sociology remains suspect here by its very nature, because it views people under the aspect of more or less predictable classes rather than as free (and hence unpredictable) individuals. The sociologist had his own answer: as Talcott Parsons has put it, modern society has "institutionalized" individualism. One proof of this is that less modernized societies than our own, like Vietnam, Russia, and Brazil, have in their various ways rejected the autonomous individual we have tried to propagate among them as a bit of foreign tissue. This is surely an interesting fact -- and, from the viewpoint of the individualist ideology, an odd one. We have been taught by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and perhaps Kant and Mill to think of the individual as the "natural" unit of society. How is it that less advanced -- and presumably more "natural" -- societies have been less hospitable to this unit? The reason is that the autonomous individual is not a reality in any "state of nature" yet discovered. On the contrary, primitive societies are nearly always authoritarian (and male-dominated). Individualism is a late bloom of civilization. It is only when a society is highly refined and sophisticated that it can entertain individual "rights" sustained by the entire social structure. The state-of-nature philosophers themselves were creatures of remarkably advanced cultures. It was only when the private contract had been long established that men could imagine that all of society had its origin in a "social contract." Individualism did not antedate civilization. It is the froth of civilization. Of course everyone professes to know better than Locke that such a state never existed in nature. (Actually Hobbes had admitted as much.) But, just as fundamentalists and literal interpretations of the Bible have given way not to simple unbelief but to a rarefied liberal Christianity, with theologians like Rudolf Bultmann distilling a Christian essence from the residue of facticity, so modern individualism continues to hold that somehow the individual is "real" and society merely "conventional." But of course this is a fatal reduction. The interrelations of individuals (which is all that "society" means) are as real as the existence of individuals. Indeed, no individual could exist unless at least two other individuals had interacted biologically; and hardly one could have survived without the systematic support of others. Most important, no one can have "rights" unless others recognize, respect, and defend such rights. There can be no genuine right that does not presuppose a viable social order. In a sense, abortion is the test of individualism. If we realize that every individual is essentially dependent on society, we can construct (or rather perfect) a social order that fosters genuine individual rights. But the doctrine that the genetically unique human being in the womb may be killed at another's whim, however this doctrine is disguised in the rhetoric of liberty or self-determination for those others, is a false and self-contradictory conception of freedom. It is like speaking of the liberty of the slaveowner. It really means privilege: the "right" under law of one person to violate the right of another. One test of a right, after all, is whether it can be universalized and reconciled with other rights. The "rights" asserted by the new feminism seem to have been formulated willfully, without consideration either for those of fetuses, whose humanity is denied, or for those of fathers, whose humanity is, however grudgingly, admitted. The phrase "women's rights" means more than it purports to mean. Most people assume that it means simply the extension of human rights to women, when in fact it means the extension of special rights to women as a privileged class -- at the expense, if need be, of the rights of others outside that class. Hence this feminism is not altogether in Parsons's language a universalist movement, but a regression to particularism. Its rhetoric is progressive and humanitarian, but its substance is reactionary and anti-human. It makes unqualified claims for self-serving values without regard for the competing claims of other values, or the rights of other people. And the best evidence of its essential inconsistency and even hypocrisy is its on-again, off-again admission/denial of the relation between a man and his child. In a sense, there is no turning back from individualism. Civilized people have recognized that we are all related to each other, and that each is therefore special by virtue of membership in the whole. It may be wearisome to repeat that no man is an island, and it may seem fresh and daring to assert that every woman is an island; but a philosophy that denies even the most intimate of human relations -- those among spouses, parents, and children -- is hardly a philosophy of the sacredness of responsibility, not only in its derogation of duty, but in its indifference to the things that really do make people respond to each other morally: love, the sense that a part of one's self is invested in others who are close to one. Human dignity means not that everyone is important to himself, but that he is likely to be -- and ought to be -- precious to someone besides himself. One of the evil things about abortion (as we are often reminded) is that it arises, in many cases, from the dereliction of men who don't want to be fathers. Surely it is no remedy to weaken the rights of men who do. This essay originally appeared in HUMAN LIFE REVIEW (Spring 1978) and was reprinted in the book SINGLE ISSUES: ESSAYS ON THE CRUCIAL SOCIAL QUESTIONS. The Fog (pages 8-9) Now and then one comes across a passage in an old book that seems to leap off the page to address the present. I recently happened across this one in G.K. Chesterton's WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD?: There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction.... It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men -- so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites.... It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, =if he knows what is Socialism.= But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its way; and quite right, too. One can meet an assertion with argument; but healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency.... Against this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be infected by diseases. I think this perfectly catches the plight of the orthodox in our own day. All the new enthusiasms, so baffling at first, turn out to be elaborate evasions. What looks like an unfortunate ambiguity turns out to be a willful equivocation. For while you ought to apologize for failing to understand the new theological, political, or cultural savant, finally it dawns on you that he has been intent on confusing you all along. His vagueness is not an accident, but a strategy. A familiar example is the campaign for legal abortion. At first the reformers wanted to sound as if they deplored abortion as much as anyone, but thought the way to contain its evil effects was to legalize it and thereby put it under the standards of public hygiene. Soon, however, they had attained legalization, and began expressing doubts as to whether we could even say that abortion was wrong. And finally they demanded that abortion be accepted as a "basic constitutional and human right." Their doctrine has shifted; their direction has remained constant. Abortion foes have been accused of stridency and bigotry for predicting that legalizing abortion would lead to legalizing infanticide and euthanasia, but they have been vindicated by events. The once furtive practice of allowing defective infants to die (usually by starvation) has begun to peep forth to seek -- and obtain -- the sanction of the courts. A movement for euthanasia has already begun. All this is happening in a moral fog. At each step, the new enthusiasts warn us against expecting further steps, yet further steps regularly follow. And why not? We hear the constantly changing rationales for change, but no principle on which we can expect change to stop. We are merely told that it is futile, and morally reactionary, to "oppose" change. The convolutions of casuistry are dizzying. We are informed that to outlaw abortion is to impose a religious conviction on others, and even that getting an abortion is a free exercise of religion, yet we are also informed that the public should subsidize abortion. All that is clear is that somebody really wants to increase the number of abortions by whichever means and arguments will serve the purpose. The appeal to religious freedom is especially audacious. Orthodox people are forbidden to bring their doctrines to bear on political and public issues. The unorthodox may do so freely. They tell us, for their own ends, that abortion is a human right, but they forbid us to define a human being. It must be said that they have enjoyed tremendous success -- not so much in persuading as in confusing and demoralizing. If there is even the faint suspicion that a human fetus has a soul of its own, an immortal soul, then we should be opposing legal abortion with all our might. We do not. We are afraid to bring this up. Legal abortion can only depend on the dogmatic =denial= of the soul. Abortion advocates should be forced to make this denial explicit. They are not. The orthodox, in short, have allowed their enemies to manipulate the terms of the debate. Embarrassing words like "soul" were effectively banned years ago, by an unwritten rule which both sides still scrupulously observe. I speak of "orthodox" and "unorthodox" rather than "Christian" or "anti-Christian." This is another concession to the fog. Many of the unorthodox are professing Christians, appealing to Christian principles, even as the devil cites scripture for his purpose. It is the essence of heresy to seize on a piece of the truth and magnify it until it cancels out other parts and distorts the whole. Freedom of the will (or for that matter predestination) can be cited to nullify the claims of moral law. Nowadays people typically insist on the right to follow their consciences without respect to what their consciences may be following, or where they may end up. The same pattern occurs in American jurisprudence, where the Bill of Rights is exalted over the body of the Constitution. To many people, in fact, the Bill of Rights =is= the Constitution. They think it is self-evidently good if the Supreme Court construes the whole Constitution in such a way as to "expand" the rights of the individual. But what individual? The individual as dissident, heretic, crank, eccentric, freak, pervert? What about the individual we are best acquainted with: the member of family, church, workplace, society? The Constitution prescribes the social order. To invoke the Bill of Rights for the purpose of subverting that order is rather like quoting the Bible to subvert the truth of Christianity: it is simply perverse. But it is common practice. The new enthusiasts are often accused of being utopian. I sometimes think this is exactly the wrong charge. A utopia is a vision, an intelligible ideal. It may be impossible, but at least it must be specific. The innovators are just the opposite. They seldom specify. They dislike the status quo, and they want change, but they give few clues as to when they would stop changing. The radical never gives us a hint of the kind of society in which he could be a contented conservative. Chesterton give us another clue when he speaks of "the modern and morbid weakness of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal." The contemporary idealist has no ideals because, although he is hypersensitive to abnormalities (about which we can often agree with him), he is usually blind, deaf, and dumb with respect to norms. The only ideals he deals with are the animating ideals of normal society, and he hates them. He has a whole vocabulary of invidious terms of all the epics, loyalties, and aims by which ordinary people live. The Protestant Reformation was begun by people who wanted to remove what they saw as specific corruptions of Christendom, so that the Christian faith could be whole again. But there was another kind of spirit that arose too -- a spirit of perpetual discontent, that could never say that its work was accomplished until the faith was purified into annihilation. C.S. Lewis observed that certain liberal strains of Christianity could never convert the heathen, because they were a way out of orthodoxy, not a way in. The observation has a broader application to all of contemporary culture: it is infested by people who are bent on destroying the West, whether they know it or not. This essay originally appeared in CENTER JOURNAL (Summer 1982) of Notre Dame University, Indiana. Joe Sobran Turns Sixty (pages 10-11) These web pages (with photographs from Joe's birthday party this past February) load pretty quickly for most users, but those with dial-up connections should expect to have to be patient. http://www.sobran.com/articles/birthday/page1.shtml http://www.sobran.com/articles/birthday/page2.shtml THE SOBRAN FORUM Otto Scott, 19182006 by Phillipa Scott-Girardi (page 12) Otto Joseph Scott, born Otto Scott-Estrella Jr., age 87, passed away peacefully on May 5, 2006, in Issaquah, Washington. Mr. Otto Scott was a journalist, editor, columnist, book reviewer, corporate executive, and author of ten books: THE EXCEPTION: THE STORY OF ASHLAND OIL AND REFINING COMPANY; JAMES I: THE FOOL AS KING; THE CREATIVE ORDEAL: THE STORY OF RAYTHEON; ROBESPIERRE: THE FOOL AS REVOLUTIONARY; THE SECRET SIX: JOHN BROWN AND THE ABOLITIONISTS; THE PROFESSIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF JB SAUNDERS; THE OTHER END OF THE LIFEBOAT; THE GREAT CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION: HOW CHRISTIANITY TRANSFORMED THE WORLD; BURIED TREASURE: THE STORY OF ARCH MINERAL CORPORATION; and THE POWERED HAND: THE HISTORY OF BLACK & DECKER. His articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN DIEGO UNION, SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE, CHRONICLES, SALISBURY REVIEW (London), CONSERVATIVE DIGEST, HUMAN EVENTS, TABLETALK, CHALCEDON REPORT, SOUTHERN PARTISAN, and IMPRIMIS. Mr. Scott was an Associate Scholar for the American Council on Economics and Society, and a member of the Council on National Policy, Philadelphia Society, Committee for Monetary Research and Education, the Author's Guild, and the Overseas Press Club. He is the recipient of the George Washington Medal from the Freedom Foundation (1976) and the John Newman Edwards Media Award (1994). From 1998 to 2004, Mr. Scott was a "scholar in residence" at the Tri-City Covenant Church in Somersworth, New Hampshire, where he provided historical insight to the school and church staff and assisted in Sunday School instruction, high-school history, and Bible and economics courses. John Chamberlain, writing in THE FREEMAN stated, "From a libertarian point of view, Otto Scott is America's most exciting contemporary historian and biographer." The WALL STREET JOURNAL said, "Otto Scott is the thinking man's author for the Bicentennial." And Dr. Hans Sennholz, past president of the Foundation for Economic Education says, "Without OTTO SCOTT'S COMPASS, this Foundation would be devoid of an important philosophical guide." Mr. Scott is one of a great many Americans who are well-known to a special audience, but unknown to the nation at large. His ideas and concepts have had a way of filtering through society, very often detached from their origin. The phrase "the Silent Majority" is one such example. But not many know that this phrase was coined by Otto Scott. While Mr. Scott made a living from his corporate biographies, his fame was achieved from his thorough knowledge of history and poetic use of language. Mr. Scott was also the author of OTTO SCOTT'S COMPASS, a monthly journal of contemporary culture which ran for 15 years and was widely read by well-known conservatives. Though his work has proceeded without fanfare, it had not gone unnoticed. Of the past, he has commented, "I do not regard the past as dead. On the contrary, I regard the past and the present and even the future as part of an eternal reality. Ours are the same tests and crises that our fathers and forefathers encountered: all I do is remind my contemporaries that Eternity watches us forever." Otto is survived by his daughters, Katherine Anne Scott-Estrella, residing in Tucson, Arizona; Mary Nazelle Crispo, residing in Brooklyn, New York, grandson Alexander Widen; Phillipa Scott-Girardi (Stephen Girardi), residing in South Orange, New Jersey, grandsons Gabriel Molina and Matthew Girardi; and Ann Elizabeth Scott-Hugli (Hans A. Hugli), residing in Sammamish, Washington, grandchildren, Roxane Sri Hugli and Alexander Philip Hugli. Otto Scott was preceded in death by his wife of 34 years, Anna Barney Scott, in August 1997. Otto Scott is buried at Gethsemane Catholic Cemetery, Federal Way, Washington. Phillipa Scott-Girardi is an international management consultant based in South Orange, New Jersey. "We are living at a time when public knowledge of the past is fading from view, except among largely unread specialists. History, which is, technically, the study of the past, has until fairly recently been treasured because of the lessons it contains. As this knowledge diminishes in general terms, it is gradually draining everyday lives. If this trend continues unchecked, it will render the lives of our children and grandchildren empty and barren." -- Otto Scott THE COMPASS, May 1994 NUGGETS For liberals, the Constitution as written is boring old music. They want the Court to play ingenious new variations on it, jazzing it up with penumbras and emanations until it sounds like a totally different work, one they can really dig. (page 7) -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME The conservative movement, as it exists today, could have taught the old Communists a thing or two about purges. When "neoconservatism" comes, principled conservatism goes. (page 16) -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME To complain that a free economy favors the rich is like complaining that free speech favors the eloquent. (page 17) -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME Let's put it this way: you don't hear the word "usurpation" in Congress for the same reason you don't hear the word "fornication" in Las Vegas. When a vice becomes popular and profitable, it loses its proper name. (page 20) -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME Today it is easier to imagine the editors of NATIONAL REVIEW attending a Bruce Springsteen concert than reading Edmund Burke. (page 22) -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian") (pages 13-24) * Apologies to the Swedes (May 18, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060518.shtml * President Disastro (May 11, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060511.shtml * Bush's Place in History (May 9, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060509.shtml * Blaming Bush (May 4) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060504.shtml * Apocalypse Now? (April 27, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060427.shtml * Bush's Misgovernment (April 25, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060425.shtml * Free Speech in the Nominal Democracy (April 20, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060420.shtml * War and Faith (April 18, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060418.shtml * Shakespearean Masterpiece (April 13, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060413.shtml * As November Approaches (April 11, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060411.shtml * The Philosopher and the Fossils (April 6, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060406.shtml * Jesus' Government (April 4, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060404.shtml ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All articles are written by Joe Sobran, except where explicitly noted. You are receiving this message because you are a paid subscriber to the Joe Sobran column or a subscriber has forwarded it to you. If you are not yet a subscriber, please see http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml for details or call 800-513-5053. Copyright (c) 2006 by the The Vere Company, www.sobran.com. All rights reserved. [ ENDS ]