When the glorious disciples were enlightened at the washing of their feet before the supper, the impious Judas was darkened by the disease of avarice, and to the lawless judges he betrayed You, the Righteous Judge. Behold, this man because of avarice hanged himself. Flee from the insatiable desire which dared such things against the Master! O Lord Who deals righteously with all, glory to You!

The main services for Orthodox Holy Week are beginning tonight at my parish, so aside from a handful of posts marking each day through Pascha I won’t be adding anything until next week. Everyone have a blessed Pascha.

The responses to my post on Bush’s gnosticism (a term, I would add, that I am using in the way Voegelin used it) keep coming back to a similar objection: I have defined orthodoxy and traditional Christianity in such a way that it must necessarily exclude a great many professing Christians in America in one way or another, or at least it would do so on specific points of deviation from orthodoxy. Put another way, I am trying to be precise, as opposed to lumping together a wide array of Christians under a convenient banner that imputes to them fidelity to orthodox teachings and Christian tradition that they may not necessarily possess. More exactly, I am insisting on maintaining standards used to judge such matters so that we call things by their proper names and describe things correctly. Most everyone can see the problem in labeling adherents to the liberal tradition as theocrats, because theocrats are necessarily illiberal, and I think most of us can see the problem in describing decentralist, civil libertarian, antiwar conservatives as authoritarians, because these people are actively critical of and opposed to authoritarian policies. I assume most of us agree that describing jihadists as fascists rather than as Islamic fanatics is misleading and possibly intentionally so, because jihadists are simply a very different group and hold radically different views about most things that distinguish them from fascists. Nonetheless, somehow it is supposed to be permissible to paint politically conservative Christians, some of whose views may be theologically conservative and some which are definitely not, as traditional and orthodox and then use this convenient labeling to say that the bad political fruits of their very un-traditional and un-orthodox views are the result of bringing orthodoxy and traditional Christianity into government and the public square. I think this move is an illegitimate one, because it is an attempt to trace the source of a destructive ideology, but in the process Linker is deliberately overlooking the content of the ideology and fixating instead on superficial rhetoric.

There seems to be a certain resistance to my argument, which surprisingly seems to be strongest from those who are not interested in any triumphs of orthodoxy. The pervasiveness of heterodoxy should put opponents of the “religious right” at ease, because a doctrinally confused or mushy religious conservatism poses no real threat to anything except right religion, but strangely enough the broad cultural triumph of heterodoxy even on the political right instills fears of orthodoxy’s political influence. It seems to me that theological, cultural and political liberals (who are not always the same people) are still fighting old battles as if there were still a large, concerted Anti-Modernist or traditionalist contingent resisting them, and at least some of them are having difficulty getting used to the idea that they have largely driven their opponents from the field and driven them to the margins of theological discourse and the culture wars. Even to the extent that liberal victories in different areas have provoked temporary backlashes and tactical inter-confessional and even inter-religious alliances, the very emergence of an ecumenical Christianity of the right, presaged by the rise of inter-confessional Christian democracy in Europe, and the (mostly rhetorical) idea of “ecumenical jihad” are pieces of evidence of how much ground orthodoxy has given up in most Christian confessions in America. As doctrine has taken a distant back seat to practical cooperation and limited shared policy goals, this was to some extent unavoidable.

As for the question of extensive heterodoxy, Ross had a good post on this last year. In it, he wrote this:

And of course a distinctively American strand of heresy is integral to a large swathe of what we think of as “conservative” Christianity [bold mine-DL]: You could call it Americanism or Moralistic Therapeutic Deism or something else entirely, but whatever label you choose it owes as much to Emerson, Hegel and Norman Vincent Peale as to Nicaea and Chalcedon, and its emanations and penumbras influence everything from the prosperity gospel to the foreign policy of George W. Bush.

Ross wrote earlier of “the American heresy” and said this:

The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they’re imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush. Indeed, the big difference between the prosperity gospel that Osteen and his ilk are peddling and Schori’s liberal Episcopalianism has less to do with any theological principle and more to do with what aspect of American life they want God to validate.

It’s this promise of validation that is particularly important. This is the hope not so much that Christ arose from the dead and broke the gates of Hades to free us and our ancestors from our fetters, but that there is basically a way to reconcile taking up the Cross and following Him while not doing much to change how one lives or distinguish oneself from the conventions of contemporary society. It is an inoffensive, undemanding Gospel, which always seems to find loopholes for our self-fulfillment rather than calling for self-denial or sacrifice of any kind, and which exists not so much to call men to repentance as to endorse choices they have already made. Not everyone is equally under the influence of this heresy, and some resist it far better than others, but it is constantly pulling people off the royal road into one or more of a series of ditches where they find rationalizations for abuses of power, abuses of human dignity, abuses of creation and so on. No one, no confession, is immune to its effects, but what makes no sense is to say that the way to avoid falling into these ditches is to abandon the royal road and throw away the map that brought you to it.

Neglected in the discussion of Pat Toomey’s primary challenge against Arlen Specter is the likely strength of the Democratic competition in the general election. As Jim Antle correctly notes, a successful Pennsylvania Republican primary challenge would have different effects from Ned Lamont’s challenge to Joe Lieberman, and more to the point Lamont would have prevailed in a head-to-head contest with the GOP nominee. There is no way for Specter to imitate Lieberman because Pennsylvania law requires Specter announce an independent candidacy before the Republican primary. Specter cannot pursue his party’s nomination, lose and then continue to campaign. Unlike Connecticut Republicans, Pennsylvania’s Democrats are very strong and have a deep bench. Either Republican emerging from a bruising primary fight would be vulnerable, and the challenger would be more so. Regardless of who had come out of the Democratic primary with a win in Connecticut, the Democrats were sure to hold the seat because of Republican weakness. It is by no means certain that the GOP can hold Pennsylvania even if Specter did not have to face down a challenge. As things stand now, he will have to head off Toomey’s challenge, which makes his later re-election even less likely.

One of the House members who may pursue the Democratic nomination, Rep. Joe Sestak, a retired rear admiral who ran on an antiwar platform in ’06, is a great example of new Democratic strength in the eastern Pennsylvania suburbs. Sestak is a formidable opponent, and he would make it very tough for Specter to win re-election. My guess is that he would eat Toomey alive and cause the Republicans to suffer another super-landslide humiliation. Contrary to Frum’s reading of the Pennsylvania landscape, Toomey’s pro-life views are not anything like his main liability. Had pro-life views been one of the main problems for Republican candidates in Pennsylvania, the Democrats would not have recruited and chosen Casey in ’06. A party does not try to co-opt a position that undermines its opponents. It is probably more correct that Toomey’s Club for Growth economic policy views are a serious weakness, and a Toomey candidacy in 2010 that pushes a CfG agenda is probably about as well-timed and appropriate for Pennsylvania as a Santorum candidacy in 2006 that was preoccupied with hawkish foreign policy lectures and calls for greater bellicosity at a time when the public was turning sharply against the war. Entirely missing from Frum’s analysis is the significant advantage opponents of the Iraq war continue to have over supporters in increasingly “blue” states such as Pennsylvania, and this is not something that the Republicans can fix in this cycle, as both of their leading contenders for this nomination are pro-war.

On a side note, it is amusing that Frum entitled his post “Lessons Unlearned,” since one of the lessons Frum has consistently refused to learn over the years is that the war was politically toxic for anyone who continued to support it. Lieberman’s primary defeat and the collapse of Republican electoral viability in Pennsylvania are just a couple of examples that show this to be true.

No discussion of the Taras Bulba/Gogol controversy would be complete if Cathy Young didn’t add her predictable two cents:

Yet in creating their propaganda vehicle, the makers of “Taras Bulba” were arguably more unfaithful to the source than those maligned Ukrainian translators. While Gogol admires his Cossacks as warriors for God and country, he unflinchingly portrays their less pleasant traits. They are addicted to warfare for its own sake, ever seeking a pretext to unleash violence on the hated Muslims, Catholics and Jews. They loot and kill; avenging fallen brothers-in-arms, they torch churches and burn women and infants. Not so in the movie, where the Poles commit graphically shown atrocities while the Cossacks, a Russian reviewer quipped, strictly follow the Geneva Convention. Bulba even gets a respectable motive for his anti-Polish crusade: In a pure invention of the filmmakers’, Polish soldiers burn his farm and butcher his wife.

Of course, this is a convention of popular film-making, which Young inevitably attributes to propagandistic motive. In Braveheart, which Englishmen everywhere find obnoxious in its unfair portrayal of their ancestors, Mel Gibson portrayed William Wallace as an inoffensive fellow who was merely avenging the wrongful execution of his wife, rather than telling the true story of Wallace, the brigand who quarreled with local officials and killed them over a catch of fish. Hardly anyone pretends that Braveheart is a faithful representation of the history of Scotland, and viewers can be similarly skeptical of Taras Bulba‘s literal fidelity to Gogol’s story, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the either is a bad or unworthy film, much less that it can be dismissed as simple propaganda.

In other words, the creators of Taras Bulba engaged in poetic license, which hardly anyone finds even remotely objectionable when it is done in adaptations of other historic, legendary or fictional characters, but which is obviously a heinous act when it serves to portray a Cossack or a Russian in a relatively favorable way. Ideologies do come and go, and happily Gogol and his work have outlasted several of them, and one can only hope that they will continue to do so long after fashionable Western anti-Russianism, Ukrainian nationalism and Putinism are all long dead.

Will at Ordinary Gentlemen is puzzled by something:

I can’t offer any empirical evidence, but after trolling the dank alleys of the blogosphere for a few years, I’m always surprised by the lack of interaction between dissident conservatives and their mainstream counterparts. Which is odd, because if anything, the last eight years have highlighted the importance of decidedly non-mainstream perspectives, from the libertarian critique of Bush’s excessive domestic ambitions to the traditionalist take on runaway consumer culture to the renewed relevance of conservative non-interventionism.

Perhaps I can help explain. There is relatively limited engagement between the two because dissident conservatives have increasingly come to the conclusion that their mainstream counterparts have little or nothing of interest to say and that the mainstream conservatives have no interest in learning from any of their errors, and because the mainstream conservatives have concluded that the dissidents are crypto-leftists (or something else undesirable) who want to destroy America precisely because of most of the critiques Will mentions. To the extent that they refer to anything we say, it is usually to repeat this sort of trash as if it were a serious argument. The latter tends to reinforce the dissidents’ assumption that they are correct that the mainstream has nothing of interest to say, which is otherwise confirmed on a daily basis by a quick browse of the mainstream outlets and re-confirmed by their near-absolute deafness to any significant criticism from the right. Put another way, it is very difficult to talk to people who live inside a multi-layered cocoon and never want to come out.

In fact, the disengagement between the two has become more pronounced as mainstream conservatives have become more and more irrelevant to current debates over the last few years. They prefer to operate in their own universe where the “surge” has solved everything in Iraq, bankrupt petro-states threaten to dominate the world, and Jimmy Carter somehow created the housing bubble. The gap has widened still more as dissident conservatives have stopped bothering to attack mainstream conservatives with the same regularity as we once did. There was a time when refuting mainstream arguments or criticizing mainstream follies was a major, constant part of dissident conservative writing, but as their political fortunes have ebbed our attention has been turning elsewhere. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still a fair amount of criticism, but there is less of it than there used to be. It has almost always been a one-way conversation in this way for the last 15 years and maybe more than that, so this state of affairs is not really anything new. Probably the last time there was real engagement or an alignment of interests was in 1992, and the divide has been growing ever since.

Simply put, I think the reason there is so little “respectful engagement” between mainstream and dissident conservatives is that there isn’t much mutual respect that would serve as the basis for such engagement. Instead of dissolving during the early years of renewed Democratic rule and liberal ascendancy, the lines have hardened. For my part, this is why I am much more interesed in talking to and engaging with heterodox, meliorist conservatives who tend to break with the movement in other ways, because at least they are interested in ideas and policy discussions, which seem to be incidental at best in mainstream conservative discourse nowadays. If that changes, there might be more engagement in the future, but I doubt that this will happen.

In the ongoing Linker–Douthatdispute over Moral Therapeutic Deism and its relationship to the political scene of the last decade, I have to side with Ross (as usual), but Linker’s latest response draws attention to a more significant problem facing religious conservatives and conservatives in general in the wake of the disastrous Bush years, which is the extent to which they have failed to be orthodox and traditional in their theology and religion when faced with the requirements of supporting political allies who espouse radical and heretical ideas.

As I noted long ago, and as Ross has suggested again this week, it makes no sense to blame Christian orthodoxy or traditional Christianity for the religiously-tinged ideology of the Bush administration and the resulting failures of this ideology’s optimistic and hubristic approach to the world. It is no accident that the most strident and early critics of the Bush administration hailed from traditionalist Catholic and Orthodox circles that make Linker’s bete noire of First Things look like the relatively liberal, ecumenist forum that it is. Mr. Bush espoused a horrifyingly heterodox religious vision, one far more akin to the messianic Americanism that forms part of what Bacevich has called national security ideology than it is to anything that could fairly be called orthodoxy. To the extent that Linker’s favorite targets, the so-called “theocons,” were more or less entirely on board with what Mr. Bush was doing, even if they felt compelled to use their own teachings in distorted form to do it, they were not championing orthodoxy at all. One might go so far to say that as they became stronger supporters of Mr. Bush, the less orthodox they tended to become, because the arguments they had to employ to defend Mr. Bush’s outrageous actions and gnostic impulses necessarily ate away at orthodox teachings.

This has created a predicament for the majority of conservative Christians who tended to go along with, if not actively defend, Mr. Bush’s acts and rhetoric. Having identified strongly with him, these Christians–Linker’s “champions of orthodoxy”–ensured that his errors would be imputed to their beliefs, even though Bush had a very different set of assumptions. It seems more reasonable to conclude that the “champions of orthodoxy” were undermining orthodoxy to the extent that they aligned themselves with the gnostic Bush rather than judging the failure of the Bush political project to be a demonstration of the flaws in an alliance between orthodoxy and politics. It might be that somewhere in all of this there is a “cautionary tale about what happens to politics and faith” when they combine in certain ways, but what does religious orthodoxy have to do with any of this? There is a far better argument to be made that the lesson to be learned is that greater fidelity to orthodoxy would have avoided many of the errors of the Bush Era by grounding those Christians who identified with Bush politically in the stable and sobering truths of theologically conservative Christianity.

If Linker insists that Rod acknowledge that traditional Christians in previous eras defended moral injustices in the name of resisting political and social change, he cannot credibly maintain that the Christians who backed and defended a proponent of global democratic revolution can still be counted as orthodox or traditional for the purposes of making criticisms about the mixing of religion and politics today. Linker hopes that Ross will come away with the idea that more traditional and orthodox Christians should “keep their distance from political power,” but this makes sense only if you believe that it was proximity to power rather than the perverse and misguided ideas that were prevailing at the center of power that mattered. Perhaps if there had been more genuinely traditional and orthodox voices whispering to Mr. Bush that he was mortal, warning that pride is one of the most dangerous sins, or explaining to him that chiliasm and gnosticism were grave errors, he would not have been so ready to embark on path of mad revolutionary warfare and global transformation. Orthodoxy had no influence, but naturally Linker believes that it still had too much, which pretty well sums up his misreading of the religious and political landscape today.

“I think all the arguments about where he [Gogol] belongs are pointless and even humiliating to some extent,” Mr. Yushchenko said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news service. “He no doubt belongs in Ukraine. Gogol wrote in Russian, but he thought and felt in Ukrainian.” ~The New York Times

Yushchenko might even genuinely believe this–he is a hard-core Ukrainian nationalist, and this is the silly sort of thing that nationalists say. As a matter of literature, which is the relevant subject, does it matter that he “thought and felt” in Ukrainian if he didn’t write in it? Yushchenko’s appeal to Gogol’s inner life is a classic bit of nationalist evasion: literature written in the national language is often used as proof of the “emergence” or “rebirth” of national consciousness, but when a nationality does not or did not cultivate its high literary language (or had not yet defined a certain dialect as its high literary language) until very modern times it is necessary to adopt famous and important figures who, by the normal literary and linguistic standards used by nationalists, might be identified very differently. If necessary, the nationalist will even disavow outward proof of an historical figure’s belonging to a different group and appeal to mystical or emotional inner states, but at the same time cling all the more tightly to any external evidence that backs up the nationalist interpretation of the figure.

The eclectic and selective approach to evidence is typical of nationalists, as it is of ideologues in general, which helps to remind us not only of the futility of such arguments but also their fundamentally distorting and misleading character. Asking whether Gogol would have identified himself with Russia or Ukraine is to ask a question that would not really have meant very much to Gogol himself, because it is a question that would not have had political or, for that matter, cultural relevance in the mid-19th century. It is therefore not a very good question for understanding Gogol, which is what the study of Gogol ought to be focused on, rather than focusing on ways to use Gogol as a symbol. Gogol is an example of how metropolitan Russian intellectual and literary life was enriched by someone from the provinces, and recognizing him as the forerunner of so much in modern Russian literature also acknowledges the debt that all subsequent great Russian novelists owed to the idiosyncratic man who told stories about Rudy Panko the beekeeper, wrote withering social criticism of rural society and serfdom and embarked on extreme, even excessive Orthodox religious devotions that he made while essentially on a pilgrimage to what was still a very Catholic Italy. It is amusing that so many people are invested in trying to pin and lock down a person who was in many respects never fully at home anywhere.

There is something to his observation that arguments about whether Gogol is Russian or Ukrainian are pointless, because neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians are ever going to “cede” him. The malleability and fragility of what it means to be Ukrainian, and the flexibility with which Russians have routinely appropriated the history of Kievan Rus’ and the history of the territory of modern Ukraine down to 1991 ensure that the claim will continue to be contested as long as there are nationalists on either side willing to keep such a senseless dispute going.

Having a birthplace and residence in the territory of a region that later became a Ukrainian nation-state, Gogol is both easier for Ukrainians to claim but harder to monopolize. For the nationalist in newly-independent states, it is supposed to be consciousness, expression and self-identification that matter rather than geographical location, but when there is no evidence for the former apparently location will do, even though this is in turn completely at odds with the national consciousness of diasporan emigrants.

P.S. One point of clarification on this post: when I said that the question of whether Gogol was Russian or Ukrainian would not have had political or cultural relevance in the mid-19th century, what I meant and what I ought to have said was that in the mid-19th century the idea of identifying with Ukrainian ‘nationality’ or ethnicity would have been as meaningless to Gogol just as it would be meaningless to retroject modern national identities onto figures in the post-Byzantine Balkans. I should not have said cultural when I really meant ethnic or national, because there is such a thing as cultural distinctiveness between regions of the same country that does not imply ethnic or national difference between the peoples who belong to distinctive cultures or sub-cultures.

It shouldn’t surprise me, but Jonah Goldberg is mixing up conceptual categories and mashing together foreign policy positions that don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other in this column. In other words, it’s another typical Goldberg production. Consider this jumble:

Or take a look at Cuba. There’s a fresh effort under way, particularly from the left wing of the Democratic party, to lift the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Just this week, members of the Congressional Black Caucus junketed to Cuba to celebrate the heroism of Fidel Castro.

The arguments in favor of lifting the embargo are routinely swaddled in talk of realism. The Cold War is over; it’s time to throw away anti-Communist anachronisms. The only way to change Cuba for the better is to “engage it” with trade and tourism and exchange programs. The funny thing is, if you made the exact same arguments about South Africa in the 1980s, many of the same people would call you not merely an ideologue but a racist for not supporting sanctions. Indeed, today the anti-Israeli sanctions movement is infested with people who claim we must lift the embargo on Cuba.

This is a mess, which isn’t helped by the vague generalizations. It is strange that Goldberg chooses to cites a policy that is roundly condemned as a failure in his indictment of realism. The embargo of Cuba is obviously an anachronism and a complete failure on its own terms, and ending it and restoring normal relations with Cuba are long overdue. Normalization of relations with communist Vietnam occurred fourteen years ago, and obviously normalization with China took place thirty-seven years ago, and it is pretty much indisputable that this engagement and the subsequent commercial relationship established with both countries have been beneficial to those countries (or at least to portions of the population of those countries who would otherwise not have benefited). While critics of large trade deficits might be skeptical about how much all of this has benefited the United States, as far as I know there are virtually no proponents of a status quo Cuba policy who worry about such things.

Some liberals would be more inclined to push for international sanctions on Israel in imitation of the sanctions imposed on South Africa, but realists have little interest in imposing sanctions on allied states at any time, and you would be hard-pressed to find evidence that there were any realists who argued for this course of action against the Nationalist government in the ’80s. It was one of the more controversial and ultimately correct decisions of Thatcher’s government to continue to engage Pretoria while many other states were joining in the sanctions regime, and if ending apartheid rather than engaging in moral self-congratulation was the goal Thatcher’s method was more effective in changing policy.

One thing that at least some realists on the right have argued for a while is that sanctions are ineffective and counterproductive, especially if the goal is to undermine another government, and tend to punish those, namely the civilian population, whom we presumably least warn to harm. The unsentimental, “amoral” realist has a better chance of implementing a more just policy than the so-called idealists, because he is interested in both the right means and ends, and he is not satisfied with moral cant and making oneself feel better by engaging in a lot of bluster and misguided actions that backfire. Indeed, even though many realists are critical of current Israeli policy and U.S. enabling thereof, you would need to search quite extensively to find a realist who supports sanctioning Israel or organizing boycotts against it or doing anything of the kind. Such boycotts and sanctions would be exactly the sort of petty moralizing and sentimental do-goodery that blinds people to real solutions and ensures that the target of the sanctions becomes even more steadfast in its resolve to resist.

The way to tell an ideologue from a realist, and the reason realists are not simply ideologues posing as something else, is that the ideologue will persist in a course of action long after it has failed and long after everyone knows it has failed because he thinks that his “values” demand it. Instead of “let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” the ideologue says, “I am right, and the world can go to hell if it doesn’t agree.” The ideologue is terrified of having to make adjustments and adapt to the world as it really is, because these adjustments reveal to the ideologue just how far removed from that reality he has become. The ideologue keeps redefining the justification for the policy, he keeps rewriting history to suit his own purposes, and he never accepts responsibility for the failure of his ideas, because he believes they have never been faithfully followed. For the realist, cutting one’s losses and reassessing the merits of a policy are always supposed to be possibilities, but for the ideologue the former is equivalent to surrender and the latter is inconceivable. In his greatest confusion of all, Goldberg manages to mix up realists with their opposites.

R.S. McCain takes a swipe at Erik Kain for this post, which reminds me why I usually avoid reading McCain these days. Not that it will matter to McCain, but Kain doesn’t assume that “all reasonable men of good will are liberal” and as I understand it Kain isn’t a liberal. Aside from misreading Kain and making false assumptions about his motives, McCain’s really on target, but what can you expect from someone who thinks E.F. Schumacher was a Buddhist? Oh, sorry, that’s “Buddhist-influenced”!*

Kain isn’t interested in a conservatism that “does not fundamentally contradict the liberal agenda,” which the slightest acquaintance with his arguments would make clear, but it is typical that McCain assumes that anyone on the right who sees the contemporary conservative movement as bereft of ideas and rudderless is simply craving approval and applause from the left. That in a nutshell is why the contemporary movement is bereft of ideas and rudderless–not because it doesn’t heed Kain’s recommendations or anyone else’s, but because it denies that anything needs to be fixed, it refuses to entertain the possibility that the movement itself (and not just the GOP or perfidious individual politicians) has gone awry, and it insists that anyone who argues otherwise is a left-winger. Of course, the left is happy to have opponents who are clueless, incapable of reform and certain that repeating old mantras is all that is needed. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with most, much less all, of these proposals, and Erik might not, either, but it’s a fair sight better than chanting “Wolverines!” and expecting anyone to take you seriously.

* The trouble with McCain’s description of Schumacher is that it is misleading and intentionally so. If McCain called him “Catholic-influenced,” which is far more relevant to his thought, no one would blink or care, but somehow it is supposed to count against him that he had even a passing interest in Buddhist ideas.