In November I closed by indicating that I would follow up with some thoughts about our cultural trend in the direction of Europe and on how difficult our choices will be in diverting ourselves from this disastrous path.  Over the holidays I revisited a 1995 collection of essays edited by Digby Anderson for National Review under the title This Will Hurt: The Restoration of Virtue and Civic Order and was reminded that we didn’t just lately develop the social and cultural decay that have led us to this point.  It was the second of two collections on the issue, the first being an in-depth description of the problem entitled The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America.  I recommend them both.  Clearly, they represent further evidence of the old adage that “the more things change, the more they remain the same”.

Shortly after the publication of the second book, Digby Anderson wrote an article in National Review in which he summarized the essential points in both collections.  Parts of it are worthy of quoting at length:

“So what is the significance of the new talk about virtue, the reassertion of personal responsibility, the ache for order, community, ease, and goodness?  It is not trivial.  Even the renewed use of moral language is very important.  But it is not enough to put the clock back.  That demands both an intellectual project and a revolution in human commitment.  The project is to disentangle the strands of the Enlightenment legacy, to mark, for instance the proper limits of rationalistic scientific understanding, to re-anchor law in morality, to make pleasure a by-product, not a goal, to reassert the moral aspects of social problems, to redeploy social sanctions such as stigma.  This will hurt.  But what will hurt even more is a new human commitment and for this to ask: how much is modern man, even conservative modern man, willing to give up for virtue?  The problem does not lie with the clock.  Its hands can be moved in either direction.  The problem is whether men want to turn its hands back, want to do so enough to suffer the consequences.”  Pretty strong stuff, huh?  But that’s where we are.

People often ask me, what have morality and all this talk about virtue to do with our enormous economic problems?  My answer:  almost everything.  In fact, the free market cannot and will not survive without the realization of and renewed emphasis on the fact that most of the virtues required for its successful operation are those that the market itself cannot produce, and by the way, neither can science nor technology.  David Brooks makes the point quite well as related to the current European crisis when he notes: “The scariest thing is that many of the people browbeating the Germans seem to have very little commitment to the effort-reward formula that undergirds capitalism.  On the one hand, there are the technicians who are oblivious to values.  For them anything that can’t be counted and modeled is a primitive irrelevancy.  On the other hand, there are people who see the crisis through the prism of some cosmic class war.  What matters is not how people conduct themselves, but whether they are a have or a have-not.  The burden of proof is against the haves.  The benefit of doubt is with the have-nots.”

Further to the point, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal appropriately notes that “Europe’s crisis is not simply fiscal and monetary; it’s also a crisis of vision and character”.  Hmm, wonder where those things come from?

The genius of our founders provided us with a system that they hoped would protect our republic from the various tyrannies originating from our basest human instincts, and in a recent visit to the Federalist Papers I am reminded that arguments based on virtue, civic or otherwise, played almost no role in the debates on the ratification of the Constitution.  In fact, a case can be made that the Constitution is intentionally designed to function without reference to, or even in spite of,  deficiencies in human virtue.  However, notwithstanding their pragmatic approach to its design there is significant evidence of their presupposition that such a system was suited only for those men of deep understanding of and appreciation for the civic and moral virtues necessary for its success.  One can search history in vain for a classically liberal or conservative economic theorist, including Adam Smith (who was after all a moral philosopher), who could conceive of any free market system surviving in an environment of cultural nihilism and moral relativism.  Folks, our country’s problems are not primarily with government policy and economics.

Since Aristotle we in the West have been instructed that, by our nature, we are directed to an end beyond our nature, the ideal fulfillment of which requires certain virtues.  St. Thomas Aquinas expanded and elaborated on these virtues and identified those that require habitation–temperateness, courage,  justice, and prudence–as well as instruction often reinforced by law, both natural and human.  As it has turned out, these virtues and the laws informed by them over the centuries have served us pretty well, but I would bet that if Madison and Hamilton were here to survey the current situation, they would quickly see that we have stretched their model pretty far on stored moral capital and would probably recommend that we need to significantly replenish it very soon.

We are witnessing a slow, steady retreat from victory in the Middle East and, I fear, a prelude to significantly more conflict down the road and the unfortunate loss of more American lives.  Why?  Because of the political imperative of troop withdrawals to accommodate the political timeline of the Obama administration.

Is there another possible rationale for an announcement now of additional withdrawals in Afghanistan in 2013?  This policy flies in the face of the pressing need for a more assertive stance with Pakistan and will clearly result in the latter’s further questioning of America’s will in the region.  Yet we get the following comment from a White House spokesman:  “We have been very clear that we do not seek permanent bases in Afghanistan or a long-term military presence there that would be a threat to Afghanistan’s neighbors.”  What does this mean?  Look at the neighborhood–Central Asian states plus China, Iran, Pakistan.  How can it not be in our strategic interest to have a long-term commitment there, particularly when there is a very high risk of their return to failed-state status?

Then there is our premature and unwise military departure from Iraq.  Here we have the obsession of Obama to atone for the sins of the original engagement and for its implications for him of the image and legacy of colonialism.  Again we provide evidence of our fecklessness and lack of will in the region, severely damage the progress that has been made to establish a viable state, invite Iran and other subversives to foment civil war, and worse, we show complete disdain for the sacrifice of thousands of American troops who produced victory when all seemed lost before “the surge”.  And, as John McCain has pointed out, this withdrawal will have serious consequences for Afghanistan as well, providing plenty of doubts on the part of both friends and enemies about our willingness to honor our commitments there.

The announcement this week of the administration’s plan for “a leaner, cheaper military” only compounds the problem and further confuses the message with phrases like “the tide of war is over” and “the question this strategy answers is what kind of military we will need after the long wars of the last decade are over”.  Is this the President’s “mission accomplished” banner?

Of course, this flawed policy is designed to appease the American left (along with Ron Paul and his followers who can be disruptive within the GOP) and any downside will be laid at the feet of the “original sins” of the Bush administration, but I wonder how much longer this President can avoid ownership of and accountability for what is very likely to be a failed Middle East policy.  The answer probably depends on the immediate prospects for the threat from Iran, and after the recent policy decisions we should know the answer very soon.

The world lost a true hero in December with the passing of Vaclav Havel, the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia, whose efforts on behalf of human freedom are legendary, richly deserving of the Nobel Prize, for either Peace or Literature or both.  How ironic that his death coincided with that of his complete opposite, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, whom I trust will receive his just reward, but who, unfortunately, departed this life in bed.

As a colleague and soul mate of fellow dissident Natan Sharansky, Havel made a convincing case for preemptive intervention to liberate oppressed people and was an early supporter of U. S. intervention in Iraq, saying “The world could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein”.  The key word for him was “indifference”, which he considered a major danger in the world, and in an inspiring 1978 essay he warned of “the attractions of mass indifference and the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity”.  For him, the trump for indifference was the truth, which he considered inherently a moral enterprise.  He was an intellectual of the first order and, along with Pope John Paul II and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was hugely responsible for the intellectual leadership of the discrediting of the  lies and the world’s indifference to them that ultimately undermined Soviet communism.

Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism, by Charles Hill

This book is part of a Hoover Institution project styled the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order, the purpose of which is “a deeper understanding of the struggle in Islam between Muslims keen to protect the rule of reason and the gains of modernity and those determined to deny the Islamic world its place in the modern international order of states”.  In this, it does a fairly good job, primarily tracing the world order from the founding of Islam in the early Middle Ages through the re-ordering mandated by the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War through all of the various attempts to upset that order including the current attempt by the Islamist opponents of order.  Much of this history was familiar to me from other readings, so the most interesting part of the book was the author’s attempt to describe how we might proceed from here, post-9/11.  In doing so, Hill describes six issues on which the Islamists and the West are at odds and the potential for resolution of the differences in each case.  Good analysis, but not much encouragement.

Why Niebuhr Now?, by John Patrick Diggins

I have long been fascinated by the theology and philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr, but he is a dense and difficult read for me.  This relatively short book helped me greatly in understanding his thought.  The “why” of the title involves the currently popular position Niebuhr’s thought seems to hold among leading politicians and thinkers on the issues involving America’s role in the world.  The author carefully works through the theological and philosophical points, comments on how Niebuhr’s theology affected his worldview, and then closes with arguments on the misuse of Niebuhr’s legacy from both the political right and left.  Very well done.

The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, by Jonathan Riley-Smith

This turned out to be a really fun and I believe important little book.  Essentially it chronicles the vast mythology, half-truths, and manufactured truths about the Crusades, largely distorted by the language  and imagery of 19th century European imperialism and the beliefs of 20th century Muslims, traces this legacy into modern times, and clarifies them one by one.  The author, a widely-respected scholar in Middle Eastern history and a recognized expert on the Crusades, has been fighting an uphill battle for the truth in these matters for most of his career, with little help it seems.

God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, by Alasdair MacIntyre

MacIntyre has been a big favorite of mine from the time I first read his After Virtue many years ago.  I have also gained enormous respect for the Catholic intellectual tradition over the years and MacIntyre does a great job in chronicling the history of the development of this tradition and the evolution of the core elements of Catholic philosophical thought, in particular its assimilation of reason and faith.  He then describes and bemoans the disintegration of the core curriculum caused by the specialization driven by the advent of the large research university model and the resulting deterioration of the unity of the shared enterprise among the disciplines, a concern which I share.