14

The West Has to Believe in Its Uniqueness

EXCERPTS FROM A SPEECH ACKNOWLEDGING AN AWARD,
NOVEMBER 18, 1986

 

...I guess what I need to say is that however grateful I am for your generosity, I have no illusions of having earned it. I remember as a boy hearing of the young man who applied to the traveling carnival for a job. Asked by the skeptical manager just what he could do, he said that he could dive from a hundred-foot ladder into a barrel of sawdust. The manager was much intrigued by the young supply-side acrobat and ordered the ladder hoisted, from the distant top of which, moments later, the young applicant dove, to the astonishment of wide-eyed attendants, right into the barrel. The excited manager approached him, as the applicant crawled out, dusting himself off, and offered him a hundred dollars a week. But catching the expression of a Yankee bargainer, he quickly raised that to two hundred dollars and, after much sweat, to the unheard-of sum of three hundred dollars. He demanded, finally, an explanation of the acrobat’s unverbalized shaking of his head.... “Well,” the young man finally spoke, “you see, before just now, I never did this thing before, and to tell you the truth, I don’t like it.”

But I do like it. It just happens—I can only think that grace is responsible for this, while also singling me out as a baby who survived my mother’s constitutional Freedom to Choose—that I was born inclined toward the service of my own opinions which, happily, tend to coincide with those of our Founding Fathers and, however inexactly I am guided by them and deficiently disciplined in exercising them, to those of my Maker. I would deserve a medal if I got up one day and spoke out for progressive taxation, or détente, or protectionism, or socialized medicine for louseworts. But then the medal would come from such people as award them for successful screen tests by those who act out of character....

But I have solemn duties to discharge tonight. For all that he has a capacity for sport and games, Dr. Ernest W. Lefever does not fool around, not around the clock. This summer he wrote to me to say that I was to deliver what he carefully called, quote unquote, a “serious address” on the quote unquote “Future of the Atlantic Alliance.” I had just about got it figured out how this Alliance was to be held together, including which arms and how many we should ship off to Iran, when last week I received a typewritten copy of the program, which had me down as speaking on, quote unquote, “the Role of Ideas in the Survival of the West.”

I hadn’t known, until a couple of weeks ago, that we would be honored by the presence of Our Leader. In soliciting his presence, Dr. Lefever reminded me of the durability of the parable that counsels throwing out a very large net and trusting to faith. On the other hand, invitations to others to attend this festive affair were not universally successful, I have reason to know. Last Friday I received a letter from Professor John Kenneth Galbraith. “Dear Bill,” it began. “I’ve now had two invitations and a telegram from James Goldsmith asking me to attend a dinner later this month celebrating your public ethic. The price, $7,500, seems entirely appropriate for so rare a commodity.” I am sorry he did not elect to come. It would have made for a fine symbolic rebirth. We conservatives make way for late vocations, as President Reagan’s career reminds us.

Any discussion of the role of ideas inevitably brings to mind the paradigm: How ought things to be, if things were as we wished they might be? But of course the concern of the Ethics and Public Policy Center is to explore the bridge between the paradigm and the particular: the criterion and actuality. Although they are separate, the one ought never to shrink from its authority to inform the other, even as the latter should never proceed as though Providence and the morally informed intellect had not posted, however distant and obscure on the horizon, lights to guide our thought and conduct. Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy spoke as if it were our responsibility to send the United States Marines to bring freedom to the wretched of the Central African Republic. We know we can’t do this and won’t therefore do this, but that does not mean that freedom ought not to come to the Central African Republic. It is immensely heartening to hear from the president, as we have just done, that we are engaged in attempting to help freedom fighters, even if we are not ourselves taking an active role in these struggles, using American manpower.

Yes, such countries as we speak of ought to be free. That is the distinction we need to bear in mind. That which ought to be, and that which is, are always different, but the relationship between the two should be kinetic: we should know that we ought to strive, and what for. And although the president tells us that we have recovered from the period when, as he put it, “too many had lost all sight of [such an] enduring truth,” we need to acknowledge, fatalistically, that the assault on the very idea of permanent things is by no means something that happened only yesterday, nor something done only by infamous names. Historians of relativism can reflect on the implications of the thought of William of Occam, or they can look to the true founder of legal realism in the United States, the venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes. In many of his opinions, as Walter Berns has reminded us, he reflected his redundant refusal to find in our Constitution anything that suggested enduring ideals. Indeed his notion of fidelity to the Constitution was to expedite the popular will: “If my fellow citizens want to go to hell,” he said, “I will help them. It’s my job.” Unsurprising in a jurist who could elsewhere write that he saw “no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand.”

Many leaders of thought in America are constrained by a dogmatic egalitarianism to accept the notion that the toleration of pluralism commits us to the proposition that all ideas are equal. We see this in the philosophical outreach of academic freedom, which was defined idiomatically, when I was in college, by the use of the metaphor that all ideas should start out even in the race: that—by derivation—the teacher of integrity must not reveal any preference for the Bill of Rights over, say, the Communist Manifesto, let alone permit himself the asseveration that the one document is an approach toward the just society, while the other is a howl in the opposite direction. Our devotion to pluralism is nowadays translated by the professionally tolerant into the notion that in exercising his right to attend a black mass, a citizen can consecrate a profanation. That in exercising the freedom to do so, the right of the mother to kill an unborn child becomes the full-grown partner of the right of the human being to be protected from the oppressor, whether the act of aggression takes place in a concentration camp or in a clinic.

The difficulty is magnified by organizational impulses to humility in international assemblies, the United Nations acting as the principal distillery of civil egalitarianism. There the representative of the Soviet Union is deferred to as often as the representative of the United States, even when the subject under discussion is human rights. One reason for our philosophical abjectness is that the retreat from colonialism left us with the compulsion to believe that such a retreat enjoined upon us a retreat from the postulated superiority of one idea over against an antithetical idea. If infanticide, or euthanasia, or torture, is condoned by a society, as indeed each is here and there practiced, if not officially condoned, then our democratists, expansively adhering to their commitment to pluralism at home, tacitly acknowledge that that is how it is: Cultural variations, in this view, reflect not differences in the refinement of civil sensibility. They reflect, rather, what we should happily confirm, that after all, no enduring truths are finally knowable. Under the banner of pluralism, all we can with philosophical confidence say is that Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalism is simply their version of our Judeo-Christian faith. We are familiar with the vernacular turns such self-mutilating modesty takes. My favorite was the ecumenical conference in Tokyo twenty-five years ago at which, during dinner, one Oriental gentleman turned to his Western counterpart and broke the ice by saying, “My miserable superstition is Buddhism. What is your religion?”

We live in an age most awfully precarious, threatening as it does the survival of the West, and Dr. Lefever, our host, correctly intuits that only ideas will bring us through—ideas backed up, as needed, by a nuclear arsenal, pending its replacement by a space shield. I like to think that I share the ultimate confidence of Joe Louis in the divine order, as described by the president. But I am sometimes reminded of the little boy with precocious horticultural skills who tended a tiny twenty-foot-square garden in a corner of the slum where he lived. He was visited one day by a priest who exclaimed over the little floral enclave. “That is a beautiful garden you and God built,” he commented. “Yeah,” said the boy, “but you should have seen it when only God was taking care of it.” We need the Bible, and we need our Minutemen. And—the point I want to stress—we need to refine the appropriate protocols. Medical doctors manage, when for whatever reason consorting with witch doctors, at once not to give offense while at the same time declining tacitly to agree that bat-turd is a satisfactory substitute for penicillin. Beware the tug of relativism. Jeffrey Hart commented recently on the aggregate achievements of Professor Mel Bradford. Hart began by recalling that, as he put it, “A most decent and friendly Dartmouth professor of religion was quoted the other day to the effect that ‘many of us’—he meant college professors—develop a long-range historical perspective. We know that America’s existence is brief in a long-range historical perspective.”

Mel Bradford, Jeff Hart reminds us, knows that this opinion is false. “The settlers who arrived in Massachusetts and Virginia and elsewhere did not travel culturally naked or devoid of memory,” Hart wrote, “nor did America begin in 1787 or even in 1776. The Founding documents grow out of the lived experience of the colonists not least in the colonial legislatures. They go back to the Old Whigs of 1688 and much further back still: to Coke and Brackton and the growth of the common law, to the long development of the traditions of English and Scottish legal practice; the medieval patrimony of Christiandom and romanitas. The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was not, to quote Bradford, a ‘bright thought.’ America is not the short light of a November day. Its fathers are Aeneas and Moses, its predecessors Rome and Jerusalem.”

Yes, Rome, for Bradford, not Athens . . .

“Roman history,” Bradford wrote, “taught that all of this was natural; a commonwealth ‘grown’ not ‘made’; a definition by history, not by doctrine or lofty intent; and a general recognition, negotiated in the dialect of experience, that all Americans had together a corporate destiny and would henceforth depend upon each other for their individual liberties; ... [dignity], under a piously regarded common law, is a check upon ideology, not a source.”

There is much room left over for argument, even as there is room left over, under this roof, for divisions about the impermanent things. But I tender you, Dr. Lefever, and your distinguished board of directors and associates, this challenge: Deliberate the means of saying it in our public philosophy, saying that however much respect we owe to those who hold other ideas than those that are central to Judeo-Christian postulates, we mustn’t confuse any respect for the preternatural dignity of other human beings, other minds, with a respect for the fruit of their reason. How at once to do both these things—to respect a difference of opinion without undertaking a respect for different opinions? It is a searing challenge, in a world sensitive to cultural condescension, a world inflamed by the notion that one-man one-vote presupposes one-culture any-culture, one-philosophy any-philosophy, one-God any-God. The survival of the West depends entirely on the ascendancy of Western ideas, the vessel of true civil progress. The West is witness to the irreversible proposition that to be free is forever and eternally different from being unfree, and therefore that much preferred to being unfree. So that to fashion our conduct, and always our thought, with reference to the imperatives of the decalogue becomes an expression not of cultural jingoism, but a humble acknowledgment of the debt we owe to Providence.

It isn’t inappropriate, Ernie, to take satisfaction from the progress made in this direction by our initial speaker. Oh yes, he needs to rein himself in when the protocols stand up as dragons’ teeth blocking the passage of a liberating candor. But such truths as we ought to cherish come repeatedly from Mr. Reagan, came from him tonight in profusion; come from him in greater density than, at any time in my lifetime, from the lips of any other leader of the West. It is implicit in what he says that America is by no means prepared to think of its founding ideas as ephemeral. You do not proudly defend ephemeral ideas with a nuclear arsenal, which we pray will always be sedentary. But the mobility of those weapons is the ultimate witness to the conclusiveness of our faith in the ideas we gather tonight to honor, taking satisfaction from each other’s company, and from the high fraternal voltage generated by our belief in God and man, bringing to us that distinctive serenity that makes us simultaneously servants of God and masters of ourselves. I am proud to be in your company, and I thank you for giving thought to my work.