A new number of this excellent literary journal is available. Editor William Luse writes:

“The current issue of The Christendom Review is now online. In this issue we have Todd McKimmey’s own beautiful photography, the poetry debut (I believe) of a talented young woman out of Bryan College (something good’s going on up there), Elena Lee Johnson, and of the essays I’d particularly recommend Lydia McGrew’s “Epistemology, Miracles, and the God Who Speaks,” in which she deconstructs the logical irrationality of certain argumentative strategies employed by atheists against Christians. Her offerings always sharpen the believer’s intellectual armament, and in this regard she is a treasure. So read it.

In the Letter from the Editor, Rick Barnett takes note of the passing of Marion Montgomery, who was his personal friend. Mr. Montgomery – novelist, philosopher, cultural critic and Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia – was also a friend to Flannery O’Connor and most of the major Southern writers of the 20th century. He was 86.”

I’d add that my friend Mr. Luse has contributed a short essay, another of his superb blends of memory and artistry, to conclude the issue.

Cross posted at What’s Wrong with the World

(a) The danger to a political cause when one or more of its factions begin to dogmatize to the point of excommunication is especially evident in minority status. A cause that, whatever its merits, can only gain the assent of a minority of the rulers or voters will be an increasingly failed cause to the extent that it indulges the impulse of internal purgation.

(b) Some matters are of such high moral importance that one is obliged to dogmatize, even unto the point of excommunication.

The tension between these two statements lies at the heart of one of the ancient and ineradicably problems of political society. It may said to be almost coexistensive with political society under self-governing forms. It recapitulates the problem of human freedom.

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I anticipate that we will see more and more court decisions like the one described here by Yves Smith. The mortgage industry, in connivance with bankers and financiers of all shapes and sizes, introduced into the political economy, by means of innumerable frauds and sophistries, a whole field of unhedged risk: namely, the risk that the documents do not demonstrate what the securities confected out of them need them to demonstrate in order to be functioning legal securities.

Bond markets, among other menaces, remain perplexed by this uncertain risk. The financiers, again, have only themselves to blame for their woes. Let some hack attempt to prove that government, dread government, forced these enterprisers to commence their business of setting up trusts to pay out revenue to investors, by failing to properly set up legal trusts for said purpose, and I will presently prove that I am a donut.

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Whatever the outcome of the current contests of political force, or even the drama of the run-up to the next major context, it behooves us to review certain basic features of the world at war.

The key principles in the intellectual fight against the Jihad, so far as one citizen, having studied and argued the subject at length, may venture with confidence, are as follows.

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The origins of the American Civil Liberties Union are deeply entangled with Communism. Not the idealistic “liberals in a hurry” stuff of fellow-travelling fairy tale, but the bloody-minded sedition and revolutionary terror of hard historical reality.

[ACLU founder Roger] Baldwin’s radicalism caught the eye of the FBI, which quoted him in a 1924 report as having said: “The right to advocate a violent revolution, assassination, and proletarian Red guard, are all clearly within scope of free speech …”

The ACLU founder traveled to Stalin’s Russia in 1927 and wrote a book titled “Liberty Under The Soviets” the following year, which defended the Lenin’s and Stalin’s repression of dissent because they “are weapons in the transition to socialism.”

To Baldwin’s credit, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, “the modern age in arms,” shook him out of his ideological stupor and he repudiated Communism: more than that he successfully pushed the ACLU to expel open Communists, a brave move that alienated many of his colleagues, provoking several of them to resign from the organization.

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Several of my colleagues at What’s Wrong with the World have begun a hard-hitting series of posts entitled “Disinviting Islam.” Why “disinviting”? Because our country, having already rashly invited Islam, now faces a grueling challenge: will we or will we not allow the Jihadist faction to consolidate and expand within growing sphere of Islamic influence? Even under the supposedly hawkish anti-terror warmongers of the Bush administration, Islamic immigration increased and Islam influence waxed ever stronger.

By now it is evident to all but the most brassbound liberals, incorrigible in their refusal to face hard facts, that Islam contains within it a sizeable faction of determined men whose politics derive from the warmaking doctrines of the Jihad. Wherever Islam is, this faction will be also. Virtually every time a Jihadist is arrested (as one recently was in Portland) for conspiring to bring fire and slaughter to unarmed American civilians, we are treated to a mass of all-too-familiar reporting to the effect that almost no one suspected that this quiet kid who kept to himself could possibly turn to Jihad. Indeed, in several recent cases it appears that the division between the Jihadist and the elusive moderate Muslim drives all the way down to the household level. So wherever Islam is, the Jihad will be.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the folly of liberalism on this matter more clearly than that its adherents persist in laying hold of the old idiom of racism in abusing their interlocutors, when it is evident to anyone with a modicum of curiosity that this is chiefly a doctrinal and cultural, not a racial matter. Speaking from personal experience, it’s now been almost five years since I spent a portion of an evening at an event at the University of Georgia arguing (quite civilly) about the Jihad with a Muslim of Swedish extraction and American heritage.

So we have foolishly invited Islam into our country, without ever taking a moment for objective historical analysis of what is entailed in that invitation. We have brought the menace of the Jihad to our shores, and it is absolutely vital to recognize the manifestly domestic threat in poses. It has long been convenient for conservatives to pretend that it is purely a foreign threat, but the evidence belies this illusion. Thus it is high time we began the hard work of discussing how Islam can be disinvited.

Part I in the series, by Lydia McGrew, lays out in detail all the points of baleful influence that our folly has exposed us to, from honor-killings to Jihadist conspiracies. Part II, by Jeff Culbreath, discourses (with a boldness that will surely shock many readers) on possible policies responses. Part III, addressing the question of how Christian charity should apply to this problem, will appear Friday. I invite all Redstaters to join the conversation.

Some months ago on a lively email list of which I am a member, a discussion of some controverted legal doctrines digressed into a debate over the status of the Preamble to the US Constitution. Several incisive lawyers insisted that its status, legally, is nil. They allowed that the phrase “We the People” establishes the legitimacy of the document as having been made by consent, which is of course what the Declaration of Independence lays out as the basis for the just powers of government. But what they denied is that the remaining clauses of the Preamble can have binding legal authority.

Strictly speaking we would all be alarmed if, let us say, the learned justices of the Supreme Court, taking in hand a duly-enacted piece of legislation, and scrutinizing its content, adjudged it unconstitutional on the grounds that it failed to “promote the general Welfare” or “secure the Blessings of Liberty.” That would be an open door to extraordinary mischief, which the Philadelphia Convention surely did not intend. In that sense I agree with my lawyerly interlocutors: the Preamble cannot be thought to formally bind statutory enactment as the rest of the document does.

But where I part ways with them — and part ways with the ingrained scholarly habit of what we might call, with a touch of burlesque, “latent anti-Preamblism” — is when they undertake to set aside the Preamble more comprehensively, when they commence a reading of American constitutionalism abstracted from the purposes laid out there: in fine, when they embark on an effort to understand our political tradition without including in that attempt an understanding of that complex, meandering sentence which serves to put the world on notice as to what ends “We the People” have set ourselves in the course of constituting ourselves a unified people here in these United States of America

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What if virtually every variety of debt security were still overvalued? What if, to put it another way, the aggregate demand for debt securities had fallen off dramatically and never returned to its pre-crisis state? What if virtually every imaginable mechanism of accounting legerdemain, every method of budgetary chicanery, every generous wink-and-nod easement, every facility of subtle support for usury, had been employed in the effort to prevent the pain of that massive loss in demand from being felt?

Back up a step. What if, right alongside an unprecedented rhetorical and regulatory onslaught on business enterprise, we were living under an unprecedented coddling of finance capitalism?

Well, these are tough questions that I do not propose to answer with any finality. But I do think that, at the highest levels of financial sophistication, the global political economy is still in such a state of flux and disorder that any statement pretending toward finality ought to be treated with the utmost skepticism. Thus I do think that we must strive by all the means of our appointment, to realize that the political economies of the world are still adrift in uncharted seas. Uncertainty still reigns supreme; and we all must be ready to observe and record facts that may well disturb our prior certainties. We have to keep these sorts of questions open, and maintain a hardly skepticism of that ideological frame of mind which would close them prematurely.

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Looking over the modern world and all its proliferating works, one may note a strange fact: even when a cliché is easily recognized as such, the recognition only rarely issues in a vigilance against the lazy thinking behind the cliché. Men will chuckle at the folly indicated by the cliché, and then race off in unthinking confidence, impelled by that very thinking. So we find folks who pronounce solemnly that “you can’t legislate morality,” cheering in joyous triumphalism when a judge legislates a very strident sort of morality on the matter of gay marriage. Or we discover scholars whose minds are full of slogans about the dangers of concentrated power shrugging insouciantly about the extraordinary concentration of the power in finance capitalism. (In 1950, finance accounted for some 10% of American business profits; by 2005 that number had quadrupled. It would be difficult to locate a starker indication of concentration than that.)

So whenever you hear someone piously repeat a cliché, even a very wise cliché, there is probably good cause to suspect that his mind remains under the spell of error indicated by the cliché.

Modern men will say, with solemn faces, that generals are always “fighting the last war,” precisely as they go about thinking with ironclad consistency about . . . fighting the last war. Now the “last war” for almost all modern men is what has been called Total War: democratic army arrayed against democratic army, nation in arms against nation, whole societies mobilized and on the march in a clash to the bitter end, as in the war that still bulks biggest in our minds, the Second World War.

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In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, the German newspaper editor Josef Joffe contributes an intriguing if somewhat ungainly little essay; its subject is the mosque in Hamburg where Mohamed Atta and other September 11th conspirators plotted their treachery. German authorities recently shut it down. One of its jihadist preachers was finally tried and imprisoned. “This is where Imam Muhammad al-Fazazi used to preach venom and murder throughout the 1990s, opining that ‘Christians and Jews should have their throats cut.’ In 2003, a Spanish court gave this pious cleric 30 years for planning attacks on Jewish institutions in Morocco.”

Mosques have become controversial in the West. To elite liberals, this is cause for dismay and anger, and evidence of the derangement of the Western mind. More sympathetic consideration would disclose that certain striking events — for instance one in Lower Manhattan on a fine September morning — may possibly have left an impression on Western observers.

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Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, converted by St. Paul, along with Sts. Barnabas and Mark, on his first missionary journey. It remained Roman (and Byzantine) for 800 years, excepting a brief period of Arab occupation, until its conquest by the Crusaders under Richard Coeur de Lion, who in turn sold the isle to exiles from the defeated Crusader kingdoms, whose descendants ruled there for some three hundred years.

By the mid-15th century, when all the Christian world was shaken by the fall of Constantinople, Cyprus came under Venetian influence. It was destined to became an important possession in that illustrious city’s glittering Mediterranean commercial empire. The coat of arms of the Lion of St. Mark, and the protection of her galleys, preserved the island in Christian hands until July of 1571.

On some pretext, authenticated by a pliant mufti, the Sultan succeeded in nullifying a treaty of peace he had signed with Venice; and he declared, on fine Islamic principle, that since Cyprus had once been Muslim, it should again come under the peace of the ummah. “Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth!” He raised an army of nearly 100,000 men, many of them the dreaded Janissaries, the special forces of the Turkish military, and put it under the command of an ambitious general, Lala Mustafa Pasha, his former tutor.

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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute was founded in 1953 by William F. Buckley, Jr., and Frank Chodorov. Its purpose is to reorder the American university toward liberty, rather than the gaggle of derangements into which it has descended, and thereby to “sustain a free and virtuous society.” With particular emphasis on the rising generation of students, the good folks at ISI undertake their charge with vigor and imagination.

Speaking plainly, some of the very best books available anywhere are published by ISI. I am partial to their ongoing series of short biographies on lesser-known American Founders. They also recently reissued an excellent volume of Churchill’s early writings, which I reviewed here. Another recent favorite of mine is a collection of essays by the unjustly neglected writer Agnes Repplier, a native daughter of Philadelphia, with whom all Americans should be familiar, and now, thanks to ISI, all can be. These are but couple examples off the top of my head of the outstanding work that ISI does.

The Institute also houses a number of first rate journals, including Russell Kirk’s old quarterly Modern Age, and the premier conservative academic journal of political philosophy, The Political Science Reviewer. A considerable amount of the archive history of these excellent journals is available online. Years ago, when I worked a night shift, I recall browsing these archives in amazement at the richness of thought and argument at my fingertips.

The Institute’s academic programs, lecture series, academic fellowships, college guides, and a variety of other resources, are also very highly-regarded.

Like most organizations that rely on donations, ISI is struggling under the burden of recessionary times. In this season of taxation, when we are all forced to lay bear before agents of the state in exquisite detail every dash and dot of our economic activity for the previous year, with the burden on us get everything right (an outrage which our monomaniacs of privacy countenance with remarkable aloofness), I ask that you would consider among the recipients of your charitable giving this fine Institute. Few organizations in the country put in more hard work to establish the scholarly basis by which, now illumined by the wisdom of our ancestors, our descendants might one day recover the vision and understanding to see the modern managerial state, and its lifeblood in debt and taxation, for the imposture it is.

The Moroccan government has begun what amounts to an expulsion of all Christian missionaries. Considering that the speech of a Dutch politician said to be anti-Islamic, or a Swiss law to curtail the building of minarets, is the kind of thing that attracts extensive and often hyperbolic press coverage, one might expect that this new Moroccan policy might be worthy of notice. Alas, aside from a few blogs and a handful of New Zealand websites, this outrage has gone unremarked. My brother Robert Cella has some firsthand experience in missions work in Morocco. Here is the note he wrote me about the explusion:

The children’s home that rests on the hills outside of the town of Ain Leuh, Morocco has been a haven for the marginalized orphans of Morocco for nearly a half century. Founded in 1957 by two American women dedicated to caring for the abandoned children of Morocco, the Village of Hope, has been a beacon of hope and healing to the orphans for over half a century — until two days ago, when the hand of the Moroccan government turned against it.

In recent years the campus has provided homes and families for more that 30 orphaned children, placing them in the care of dedicated expatriate couples who have committed to raising each child to adulthood. Most couples and staff have come as Christians, looking to ease the pains of the broken social structure in Moroccan rural life. The couples act, in all senses of the word, as parents to these children, calling them sons and daughters and imparting to each their own last name. They have taken the children into their homes and raised them as their own — a true blessing as they would otherwise be placed in massive state-run orphanages. In addition to taking up these particular burdens as foster parents, the Village also provides numerous services to the local community. They provide free quality education to each child. They provide employment to many of Ain Leuh’s residents — teachers, tutors, cooks, nannies, construction workers, and workers in the apple orchards. They host annual events including a summer camp that brings in hundreds of local youth to learn basic skills, give exposure to English language basics, and play games.

I was lucky to be a part of the Village of Hope in the summer of 2005. The charming hillside community rises up from the vast valley that separates the Middle Atlas Mountains from the Low Atlas Mountains in the central part of the country. I recall my first weeks being surrounded by happy children, who would play in the newly built playground after their lessons, only to be called off to supper by their parents. The Village was a home to three core families then, each composed of about 10 kids and their parents. Throughout the summer I watched as these kids interacted with the only parents they had ever known. I recall now how the distinction between natural and real parents was nonexistent to those kids. I also recall the joy of being a part of their summer camp, shuttling local kids in a broken down Chevy Astro van, up and down windy roads with the overcrowded occupants singing loud songs in their native Arabic.

In recent days the news has come down that this charitable community, at the whim of Moroccan authorities, has been in effect shut down. The parents and all foreign-born workers have been expelled from the country, leaving children in the care of state authorities. Families have literally been rent asunder by the coercion of the state. It is an outrage to see this community, which has so faithfully filled gaps of the broken social structure, torn apart by bureaucratic caprice and the unjust fears from Islamic social pressures.

Contact the White House.

Contact the State Department.

Contact your Congressman and Senators.

It appears that, for all the supererogatory publicity, all the celebrity promotion, all the doomsaying, all the prevarication, the green agenda is breaking on the shoals of reality.

Recently, the (British) Institute of Physics — as Mencius Moldbug wryly comments “only the national physics society of the country that invented physics” — released a statement on the Climategate emails which begins with about as thorough a rebuke as can be imagined from a bureaucratic institution:

The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

(Emphasis added.) In a word, they are calling into question, not merely a handful of deceitful scientists, but the entire field of climate science.

Meanwhile, even in Boulder, Colorado — a town of which men have japed, with only a touch of exaggeration, that the Commies never captured a more beautiful slice of land — even there, the green machine is laboring mightily where it is not simply sputtering out. This Wall Street Journal report laying out the obstacles Boulder faces to implementing its green agenda, is illuminating, and not without humor.

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Outside Nashville, Tennessee, September 19, 2009. Leon Wolf is trying to starve me.

I’ve been living for 16 hours on a diet of Bushmills, Guinness Stout, and sunflower seeds. But at least I’m on the golf course. The rain is coming down now, but it will clear soon. My companions are Leon and his son, who are just learning the game, and who, in their eagerness to get out and play, have somehow neglected breakfast.

Leon is a tall stoic man, whose face seems to always show the hint of a bemused smile. His clubs are too short for him. Like many new players with good athleticism and some background in baseball, he is constantly fighting encroachments from muscle-memory of the baseball swing into his golf swing. Once he manages to develop a repeatable swing with that big frame, however, I predict that he’ll be able to really spank the ball.

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ISI Books has inaugurated a superb new historical series. Each volume is a slim, elegant, crisply-written study of what we might call the Lesser Founders. These are the men who built America but who, obscured by the towering giants of that age, haven’t been properly given their due. In comparison with Washington or Hamilton, few men measure up. But these Lesser Founders were impressive men in their own right, independent of mind, bold of action, mostly self-made, morally and philosophically serious, and they lived in fascinating times.

So far there have been studies of Luther Martin, “forgotten Founder, drunken prophet” according to Mr. Bill Kauffman’s subtitle; of the “incautious man,” Gouverneur Morris; and of that ablest of Washington’s lieutenants, Nathanael Greene.

These books belong in the library of any student of Amerca.

One thing we know about the last Great Depression is that it unleashed some of the most awful political ideas ever known to man. Economic dislocation and crisis often have that effect: provoking and liberating that which is most base and wicked in the politics of man. Here, for instance, we have a comment on the faithlessness set loose upon the world in the 1930s, from a great scientist of despair and treason whose penance for his own was his long perseverance in a cause he thought doomed, Whittaker Chambers:

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors — men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, man banded together by millions, in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

The horror of treason is its sin against the spirit. And for him who violates this truth there rises inevitably Bukarin’s “absolutely black vacuity,” which is in reality a circle of absolute loneliness into which neither father, wife, child nor friend, however compassionate, can bring the grace of absolution. For this loneliness is a penalty inflicted by a justice that transcends the merely summary justice of men. It is the retributive meaning of treason because it is also one of the meanings of Hell.

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In one of Redstate’s previous iterations, several years back, some of us maintained a running debate on the meaning of patriotism. The old archive site does not lend itself to facile searching, so I fear that much of what follows will be both repetitive and inadequate; but this was always (for me at least) a fruitful conversation, despite its many difficulties and frustrations, and I see no reason why it should not continue.

The parties to this debate are many, their individual nuances and complexities abundant, but the main lines of argument cluster around a series of questions. (1) How much of the content of patriotism is ideological, that is, how much does the love of one’s patria depend upon the political ideas associated with the patria? (2) What is the role of pre-rational passion or affection or veneration in the formation and maintenance of patriotism? (3) How do the reasoning and feeling aspects of man bear upon his love for his native land?

Each of these questions presents us with some presuppositions and some implications. Question (3), for instance, presupposes that man is a dualistic creature; that reasoning and feeling mean different things, but are each part of what it means to be man. Question (1), meanwhile, implies a disputation not merely over what political ideas should be included in patriotism, but even over whether political ideas, of any kind, should be included at all.

Let us briefly consider a single political idea, or at least a single category of political idea, in its relation to patriotism: democracy. The word means rule by the many, which in practice translates to some kind of majoritarian, plebiscitary, or representative rule. Democracy also strongly implies political equality as a driving principle. This brings it into some tension with another common political idea, namely freedom, because freedom, in order to have any meaning, must allow for possibility of unequal outcomes. Democracy, especially when it is preached as a universal ideal, also comes into tension with particular loyalties. Strictly speaking, the natural family is an offense against equality: its internal arrangements are hierarchical and particular, especially with respect to those outside it. And from the universal perspective, favoring one’s own nation or people is certainly an offensive against equality.

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Out amongst the usual street theater that follows a meeting of world economic powers like that held last week in London, the observer will behold a good sample of debased political idiom. The banners read like cant on stilts: “Abolish money” and “One currency, one government, one world” and “The government lies” and “Democracy is an illusion” and — my favorite — “No borders anywhere.” It is a peculiar amalgam of cynicism and Utopia, this idiom. The great reaction against a failed aspect of modern Capitalism shows at once a sneering mistrust, often bolstered by dreary conspiracism, and an almost innocent hope in drastic remedies. Somehow modern politics has managed to bring into alliance despair and idealism.

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G. K. Chesterton, demonstrating his genius at the art of paradox, once referred to optimism as “morbid.” Since the moment I read that (it appears in the second chapter of The Everlasting Man, I have felt in my bones that it is true, and have accordingly nurtured a healthy repugnance for the braggarts of optimism. But as with many paradoxes, it is difficult to explain without vitiating its power to surprise and thus enlighten. A true paradox is not a mere turn of phrase, a linguistic subtlety. It is attempt to fill a gap in man’s power of understanding. It is a rhetorical reach, a heuristic device to explain what is in the end a mystery to our meager powers of mind. The paradox is a human reflection of the mystery of being.

So in the hands of a master like Chesterton, the paradox becomes an instrument of extraordinary explanatory power. It can show us, as in a flash, a principle or precept which might by other means requires hours of lecture to impart. (There is an obscure masterpiece, long out of print, called Paradox in Chesterton, by a critic named Hugh Kenner, which lays all this out with great elegance. It ends with the astonishing claim for GKC that he be called a Doctor of the Church; and more astonishing still, the reader finds himself convinced.)

In this case of the problem of optimism, Chesterton’s paradox opened my mind’s eye to the surprising truth that optimism, being so engrossed with the potential for good things, courts ruin and despair by minimizing bad things — or, in the parlance of finance, by minimizing the downside risk. Especially when abetted by the modern doctrine of progress, optimism is morbid because of its tendency to induce blindness concerning man’s limitations.

Now I have a concrete, factual illustration of the problem of optimism, right in front of everyone’s eyes.

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