Last night I went to hear a lecture by Dr. Roger Scruton on "The Defense of the West," or—the real title – "Who Are We?" Dr. Scruton is the founder of The Salisbury Review, the publication which managed to break through the entrenched fortification of British socialism and establish a voice for conservatism in that country. Concerning conservatism, the Brits have an unfair advantage over Americans every time. By just being who they are, they exemplify the virtues of a classical education, they speak well --- which surely must have something to do with the ability to think --- they are clothed in attire rather than blue jeans and they always look a bit quizzical, as if they had just heard the sound of distant bugles and riding to hounds. Habits formed out of a long accomodation to the requirements and vicissitudes of history have helped to make the British temperament what it is, for better or worse. British conservatism, being more a matter of life and temperament, began to look to America, some half-century or so ago, for intellectual stimulation, although American conservatives were only too glad to return the compliment by always quoting Burke back at them.

The mutual love affair between American and British conservatives reached its apogee in the Reagan years. Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher were right to oppose socialism. But somehow the message of austerity only applied to government; it was never applied to the economy which, like a housewife gone to seed, settled into her bathrobe and slippers for the long haul of endless consumption. The right to consume was the unstated, untouched and unchallenged dogma of the "conservatism" born of the Reagan-Thatcher alliance – despite its apparent progeny which went about saluting the flag and respecting God.

I speak perhaps with a mildly satirical air. I considered myself a conservative all through those years, but nowadays I feel betrayed by those who call themselves conservatives. The idea of consumption accomodated itself to socialism just as it has accomodated itself to the pretended anti-socialism of the Right. Conservatism never mean conservation, and the result of all its tumults is that the State has emerged even stronger than before. This breaking of contract of the State to the citizens was not fomented solely by the conservatives, of course. Roe v. Wade in the U.S. had announced that the State would no longer feel obliged to protect the weak – thus undercutting the justification for its own existence – and this was the work of the liberals. But the long progress of the State through contractarianism to socialism – the progress carefully delineated by Paul Johnston in his essay, "Urbino" – printed on one of my websites, see link at left – culminated with the final breaking of the contract. There was no longer any contract. The State had become the organ for plunder. And so it is today.

Mr. Scruton’s talk began in an unfortunate way, for me, with animadversions against the "Islamic terrorists." Perhaps I should worry more about this threat to Western civilization than I do. But somehow I see the Western condemnation of the Muslims as a way of denying our frightful dependence on their oil and hence our way of denying any moral responsibility to limit consumption. As far as I can tell, the history of Anglo-American relations to the Arabic countries is one of betrayal, hypocrisy and arrogance. Only we can’t see it. Mr. Scruton did not mention how the factor of Israel plays into all of this. How can I believe in anything he said, given an omission of this magnitude?

In Mr. Scruton’s view, a nation’s loss of self-belief and confidence invites destruction. By displaying self-doubt we invite aggression. In this, as in so many other areas, Mr. Scruton spoke a half-truth, or perhaps it was the cart before the horse – or perhaps a half-cart. It seems to me that confidence derives from obedience to the moral law. The moral law applies to everyone and no man, woman, race, self, nation, people, way of life or government, is God. This does not mean that these things are not good. We stand upon and amidst them precisely because they are limited goods and worth defending in light of the moral law, which implies the recognition of reciprocity, perspective, and mutuality in a world of real but limited goods. I believe that the West universalized this moral law through the development of thinking and in its commitment to the idea of truth. This development was a spiritual contribution of first rank, and it became the foundation for science and for great technical achievements.

But Western nations are now showing signs of strain. We no longer develop sufficient depth and inwardness of character to grasp the moral law from within, which means, being able to see how something can be both good and limited at the same time. We used to know it – when we had a real knowledge concerning the existence of God. In the final end of things, only God is good. It is not that God has ceased to exist for us; it is rather that our modes of knowing have become God for us. The consumption holocaust that Western society has become derives from our having ceased to defend the moral law as the foundation of thinking. Squirting "confidence" like cool-whip on the top of this golden calf will not do. Mr. Bush has a lot of "confidence." But distinguishing "confidence" from stubbornness, blindness and bullying takes participation in the moral law through the act of thinking. And it is this participation which conservatism seems to have abandoned.

Mr. Scruton had some very good things to say about Christian forgiveness – "true tolerance is a form of forgiveness" – which he considers to be the real innovation in Western societies and forms of government. I think this is a powerful idea and probably very true. But I wish that he had demonstrated a more forgiving understanding of the Muslims and a more realistic assessment of the Americans. His talk waxed a bit sentimental on the virtues of "small town America" – a point that a member of the audience later challenged him about. I am afraid that Mr. Scruton’s talk only reinforced the tendency in America to keep feeling good about ourselves. I say this not because I support the indulgence in self-flagellation and breast-beating so characteristic of the Left. I think that the Left, corrupted by the utopian perfectionism of socialism, lost sight of the good through its own zealous promotion of it (a dynamic well explained by Paul in his essay) and hence lost the support of the people. But the Right made the good illimitable, and by casting off limits, abandoned the imperatives of morally responsible thinking. Together the Right and the Left both contribute to the reprehensible bloatedness that has become our self-justification for existence – a bloatedness that is apparent in our attitude towards the future of mankind, civilization, international law, natural resources, public life, culture, and the economy. It is not enough for the wealthy nations to spout slogans about "freedom" when they show no willingness to examine their own behavior or make any sacrifices for the common good. I fear that "freedom" has become the code word for Western elites to do as they like. It has been ripped from the moral law and is no longer balanced by concepts of self-restraint and mutual obligation. Neither the Right nor the Left seem capable of bringing order into the confusion of our minds or of arresting our slide into entropy.

 Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, came to Philadelphia last night to give a talk at the Free Library on behalf of his new book, Gag Rule: On the Stifling of Dissent and Suppression of Democracy. My friend and I arrived an hour before the talk and found to our surprise and dismay that the library is no longer open until 9 PM. Due to a new tightfisted civic regime and now open national disdain for the concept of public service, which seems to have swept the country, the library directors have decreed that the library shall only be open from 9AM until 5 PM daily (thus preventing anyone who works a normal day from ever using the library). In order to accommodate Lapham’s talk, the library was to be reopened at 7:30 PM.

But such is the way of advanced sclerosis in societies, as in human beings: there is an immense expenditure and reduplication of effort to accomplish a minimal purpose grudgingly conceived.

On being turned away from the library at 7, my friend (a native of Detroit) looked around and commented that Philadelphia’s main library is no longer open after business hours. "This is what happened to Detroit," he commented. Businesses and public areas shut down, people disappear. The ruins of civic life then become the internal encampment of predatory gangs and low-level warfare.

We returned forty minutes later for the lecture, which was, as we expected, crowded. Lewis Lapham, scion of a distinguished lineage, is a literate celebrity of leftward views, and I have often been entertained by the acerbic style of his essays. Over the years I have corresponded with him in a restrained and desultory fashion, the first of my letters prompted by an article that had appeared in the magazine. I enclosed a short piece in rebuttal to this piece, part of which later appeared in Harper’s as a letter to the Editor. I received in reply from Lewis Lapham a courteous reply, in which he mentioned - inspired by something I had said - that he had studied some years ago at Oxford with C.S. Lewis.

This exchange may have occurred fifteen or twenty years ago. Over the intervening years I may have sent two or three other letters to Lapham, invariably receiving some sort of polite acknowledgement. For this occasion I suppose I expected that Lapham would challenge the dormant American media or mount some sort of opposition to the ruling party’s suppression of alternative views with respect to foreign policy or other issues of importance. This was what might have been hoped for; it is not what happened. If there is a serious problem in the country and egregious abuses of power, one would hope that those alarmed about it would attempt to build alliances and fortify resistance. One would hope that a man who wields a forceful pen like Lewis Lapham would offer to the ever-dimininishing ranks of the awake citizenry some facts and some passion, rightly directed and applied. A man who sees through the machinations of the corporate elites ought to have a voice that doesn’t sound like that of a corporate accountant, and the message, one would have thought, would be to rally and inspire, not to degrade and divide.

Unfortunately, Mr. Lapham’s speech was primarily directed at an attack upon Christianity by way of the Christian fundamentalism of Mr. Bush’s henchmen and largest voting bloc. After a brief and interesting disquisition about the American Revolutionary War patriot Thomas Paine, Mr. Lapham read us a passage from the noted atheist Ralph Ingersoll, who detested Christianity. Most of Lapham’s talk consisted, in fact, of open or covert attack upon Christianity, with the message that no enlightened person could possibly believe it. As my Detroit-born friend later put it in a posting, "Politics in Polite Society" (Craig’sList, Mar 11) – "… Polite Society requires that religious Jews and religious Blacks be excluded from public criticism, just as religious Whites are included and characterized as the sole remaining irrationals of the Scientific Age."

While I think it is true that no person of developed understanding, and least of all a real Christian, could subscribe to the version of Christianity being put out today in Washington, D.C., I think it would also be true to say that such a perversion of Christian faith and ethics has been able to lodge in our national and government gullet largely thanks to the derision of leftist elites like Mr. Lapham. As Mr. Lapham truly said, Mr. Bush has made of his own stupidity a virtue. But what of the virtuousness of a stupid elitism like Mr. Lapham’s? He could only roll out the 19^th century fusillade of a literalist rationalist reductionism of the sort conclusively demolished by Owen Barfield – who, I might add, was one of C.S. Lewis’s closest and dearest friends. Thus he has only to oppose a literalist Christian fundamentalism to a literalist rationalism.

It was unfortunate that Mr. Lapham’s studies with C.S. Lewis did not include a perusal of Barfield’s book, Saving the Appearances, which was the most notable attempt penned in the 20^th century to save Western civilization from its own corrosive rationalism. But Mr. Lapham has long since decamped from the field in which the exercise of true reason may be expected. The subtlety and discipline of mind needed to understand this book has long since disappeared from our intellectual class, and they are only capable of renewing old arguments of a 19^th century rationalism already discredited by the rise of Jungian psychology (and psychoanalysis in general) the ambivalences of 20^th century physics, the study of the historical development of science popularized by Thomas Kuhn and others, and the study of symbolical discourse in language. All of these developments have led to taking the Western mind beyond the dead center of literalism and materialism that characterized 19^th century science.

But to Mr. Lapham it is as if these progressive developments had never happened. I am not saying that these intellectual developments are without flaws, only that they exist, and that their existence is indicative of a dawning awareness of the evolutionary history of intellectualism itself. Scientific and intellectual inquiry in Western history has grown out of a long religious and cultural heritage – a heritage which, despite its lapses, has placed a value on the search for truth. Such a heritage and such a value will not survive the attempt by corrosively rationalistic elites to destroy the basis for it, and this is in fact what is happening today. Where the Christian fundamentalists are trying to get some purchase on politics, and the market fundamentalists are aiming to control the world’s natural resources by means of the militarization of the financial sector, the "resource grab" of the leftist elites like Mr. Lapham are engaged in the despoliation of the heritage of Western Christianity. This was Mr. Lapham’s program because he happens not to like the deluded and distorted part of the Christian heritage that comprises Mr. Bush’s electorate.

But Mr. Lapham left out something important. He did not mention the Israeli bias of American foreign policy, which has been espoused by the neoconservatives, many of the most prominent of which happen to be Jews. The Jewish religion certainly did not come under Mr. Lapham’s scorn, nor the power of the Jewish lobbies, which take care to nip all debate before it even has the chance of appearing. No, Judaism was quite safe from Mr. Lapham’s diatribe against religion. The question of the cynical manipulation of Christian fundamentalism by Jewish elites was left safely untouched. This point was raised by Michael Lind, an astute commentator on military affairs, who wrote that in one of his previous writing jobs for The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative publication, he had been told by his supervisor not to make any criticism whatsoever of Pat Robertson’s views on evolution. This event, which happened perhaps ten or twenty years ago, indicates that the pro-Israel contingent that directs American policy was already thinking about how to elect one of their puppets to office. How better than to elect one of these Zionist "Christians" who have substituted Caesar for Christ and who are only too happy to march to the banner of Ariel Sharon?

You can be sure if Mr. Lapham had tarred Judaism with the same brush that blackened Christianity, his reception in the City of Brotherly Love would have been quite different, and the sheeple might have risen in revolt. As it was – with the notable exception of one brave member of the audience who defended Christianity – most of the questions seem to be on the level of school children. People asked Mr. Lapham what to do or what he read. Nobody challenged what he said.

In America, it seems, "gag rule" is mere redundancy. Why go to the trouble, since so few people can think anyway? It’s just a sheer expenditure of energy, like closing the library and then reopening it later. Why go to the trouble of attending a public lecture in a public institution in one of America’s premiere cities? The emptiness of the discourse to be found is a testament to the entropy of the elites and their fundamentalist supporters – whether they are materialistic reductionists, neoconservative or Christian Judaists, or their market representatives fanning out all over the world to impose the American Way as the Empire of Moloch.