Related to another post from earlier in the day, and inspired by Michael’s article in the new issue of TAC and Reihan’s post on national defense, I started to think about the problem of persuasion. Michael notes that movement conservatism is not engaging in any serious rethinking–even most of the reformers/reformists are by and large tinkering around the edges and none of them has much of anything to say about changing U.S. foreign policy–and he observed that there was absolutely no reconsideration of the war in Iraq going on. Some of our realist friends would dispute that and say that they have been thinking about the lessons of Iraq, but for the most part the lessons they are saying they learned are not all that satisfying. What would war supporters have to accept to demonstrate to opponents that they had learned the right lessons?

Stating the opponents’ case, Paul Schroeder wrote this for TAC last year :

The argument here is that the war never went wrong; it always was wrong, in specific, basic ways [bold mine-DL]. The distinction is fundamental, eminently practical, and involves lessons that the U.S.—its government, elites, and broad public alike—has not yet learned. It accounts for the fact that all of the current plans for getting out of Iraq are not really plans for genuinely getting out, but plans for staying on in one way or another so as to minimize further losses, recoup sunk costs, and protect particular interests. It means that until we squarely face what we have not hitherto faced as a nation—what this war represented, what we have done, and what this says about who and what we are—we will not be willing or able to take the practical steps necessary to contain the fire now burning, dampen and extinguish it as much as possible, and do what is necessary at home and abroad to prevent an even greater fire next time.

For the most part, such self-examination and self-criticism have not yet begun, and I doubt that they will start anytime soon. Even though it seems obvious to us that the war was decisive in wrecking the reputation of conservatism and the GOP, I suppose there is a certain logic, or at least a certain inevitability in the enduring conviction that there was nothing wrong with the war in Iraq that more soldiers and better planning couldn’t have solved. As Michael says, “It would be too incriminating to question the justice of the Iraq War.” More important than that, though, it would require not merely rethinking and some genuinely painful change for conservatives, but it would probably also involve tearing down some long-established, more widely-shared national myths. As Anatol Lieven said regarding the potential for policy changes in the new administration:

How much of this is likely? Eight years in Washington left me with considerable pessimism about the capability of the U.S. policy elites—Democrat as well as Republican—to carry out radical changes in policy if these required real civic courage and challenges to powerful domestic constituencies or dominant national myths [bold mine-DL].

This got me to thinking about Reihan’s remark that he didn’t think the Iraq war was pointless. Of course, I do think it is pointless, and worse than that, and have said so repeatedly for years. If it is anything, it seems to me, it is now pointless. That’s one of the more complimentary things one can say about it. At one time the war may have had a purpose, and back then it was a bad one; now it doesn’t even have that. How can one possibly persuade someone on the other side of such a huge chasm that he is on the wrong side? This is a problem that goes beyond language, tone and framing, because once you get past all of these things war supporters basically accept an important national myth–America does not fight futile, much less unjust, wars–and this is plainly irreconcilable with recognizing the futility of the war in Iraq, to say nothing of acknowledging its injustice.

Reihan is as smart and fair-minded a person as you can find among supporters of the war, and if I could imagine persuading anyone on the other side that the war was, in fact, an exercise in illegal aggression that did nothing to benefit American national security and served no vital U.S. interests that person would have to be Reihan. Right away, however, I am struck by a basic difficulty: how can a war opponent honestly call the war what he regards it to be while persuading a reasonable war supporter that he should no longer support it? Debates over the war have been as fruitless as they have been in part because the core assumptions and foreign policy visions of people on either side are so wildly divergent and contradictory that they are barely talking about the same thing.

This brings us to the larger question of persuadability–who is actually persuadable on a given question? I have started to have the creeping suspicion that persuadability in debate is very much like being an undecided voter: the less you know, and the less you have thought, about a particular topic, the more likely you are to be persuadable. This has much less to do with being reasonable, open-minded or willing to look at evidence; persuadability is probably closely linked to lack of knowledge, and the side in the debate that successfully fills that gap first wins. The longer you have been tied to a particular view, and the more time you have spent articulating reasons for holding it, the less persuadable you are going to be. Those who are persuadable are also likely to be the weakest in their newfound convictions, which they will drop just about as quickly as they adopted them.

It is true that there are war supporters who have since soured on the war or some that even flipped and became staunch opponents; war has radicalizing effects, and especially when things go awry it can cause dramatic shifts in the views of some people. Some who trusted the administration’s claims were burned when those claims were proven bogus. On the whole, however, very, very few have come into opposition because of antiwar arguments. This is a sobering realization. Was this because those making the antiwar case made unpersuasive arguments? Viewed narrowly, the answer would have to be yes, but it seems to me for the most part people who have changed their view on the war did so because of events. Their changed view had nothing to do with antiwar arguments, except indirectly insofar as events seemed to vindicate some or most of war opponents’ warnings and undermined the optimistic claims of supporters. Michael laments that ideas don’t matter in movement conservatism, but I am beginning to wonder if they ever matter in these debates.

How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one’s values, but let reason inform one’s public arguments. ~Kathleen Parker

This is the standard Damon Linker line, which has always had the small problem that it doesn’t make sense. That’s not quite fair. It makes sense, provided that the goal is to keep religious people from making public arguments that have any force. Parker, like Linker, would likely deny that this is the goal. In Parker’s case, I expect that this is because she hasn’t thought through the implications. Were we to follow Parker’s model, we would on the one hand need to say that arguments informed by religious teaching are to some degree irrational by definition (use faith over here, but use reason in public, which implies that there is nothing rational about faith or that the two are not complementary). On the other hand, we would also have to say that our public arguments cannot invoke “values,” which are in any case derived from religious teaching and therefore unsuitable to public discourse. Even to the extent that “values” might be allowed, they would have to be “values” that do not conflict with pluralist, liberal “values.” This is the Social Gospel loophole, which permits the use of Christian discourse for left-liberal ends, but which clearly forbids any version or interpretation of Christian teaching that conflicts with these “values.”

The point is not that there are not secular arguments against abortion, to take the example Parker uses, as there clearly are. Secular people on the whole do not seem terribly interested in those arguments, nor do they show any more respect for them than they do to explicitly religious ones, because the issue is not the kind of argument being made but the moral and political conclusions that are being drawn. This may reflect the extent to which different political and philosophical traditions function as little more than tribes that use mutually unintelligible mythologies, in which the answers are all scripted and known before the inquiry begins. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again….Debates cease to be an exercise in persuasion, and become instead an occasion for performance and expressing identity. Structuralists everywhere will be thrilled.

The point here is that social and religious conservatives should not have to truncate, abbreviate or deny their religious teachings when making public arguments, which is effectively what they would have to do if they are not to refer to God or religious teachings in public discourse. They could not in good conscience do so, but leaving that aside for a moment we should also acknowledge that it puts an undue burden on religious believers to insist that they leave out appeals to their core beliefs, which are or are supposed to be at the center of their understanding of man, society, creation and reason itself. It’s as if you said that liberals can make their arguments, but they must never refer to equality for any reason, but it is even more constricting than that. In the end, what Parker is saying religious conservatives should do is to accept the premises and terms of the debate that are hostile to their side before it begins, and then try to make an argument for their view under those constraints. As a matter of rhetoric and politics, this is a losing proposition. Once you have accepted fundamental assumptions of your opponents (and accepting that one can only use public reason in argument is to concede a fundamental liberal claim), you are merely negotiating the extent of your defeat.

Many modern conservatives will look at Parker’s statement and agree with it, because, as Rod reminds us of MacIntyre’s observation, “in America, all political arguments are among conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals.” This is true even of a great many religious conservatives, which is why time and again when religious conservatives are challenged in this way the best response many of them can muster is that “they have a right” to free speech and religious liberty. Indeed they do, but that is not nearly powerful enough and once again accepts–as most public pro-life rhetoric already does–that we must speak in terms of individual autonomy and individual rights. Perhaps that is the most telling thing of all, in that it acknowledges that we do not recognize appeals to God or obligations to God as being in any way authoritative, but we invest appeals to the self and the rights of the self with tremendous weight, which is a function of a culture that is egocentric and decidedly not theocentric.

The Russian newspapers had generally played down Mr. Obama’s victory, she said, because it got in the way of the establishment line: that the corrupt American democracy is composed of two warring family machines that have the system wired and controlled with the help of their corporate oligarch cronies [bold mine-DL]. It’s not a real democracy but a pretend democracy, and a hypocritical one. This helps the Russians rationalize and excuse their infirm hold on democratic ways and manners. And then the black man from Chicago with no longtime machine or money is elected . . .

So the Russian press muted its coverage. Mr. Obama’s victory upset their story line. ~Peggy Noonan

I have no way of knowing why Russia media covered Obama’s election one way or another. There is an argument that Kenyans responded with such delirious joy at Obama’s victory not only because his father was Kenyan, but also because it helped to console them for the complete breakdown of their own democratic system this year. So it is not obvious that a need to rationalize and excuse an infirm hold on democratic manners translates into muted responses to the election result. Perhaps the Kremlin is less interested in which party controls the White House than it is in the policies the candidates espouse, in which case a lack of interest in Obama’s victory might stem from a recognition that the next administration will not be very different at all with respect to Russia. What should interest us here is now how the Russian establishment line got things (not entirely) wrong, but rather the real flaws in our system, which also happen to provide fodder for other governments to cast aspersions on the integrity of our political process.

If you replace the word family in that passage above with the word political, you have a similarly cynical, albeit far from false, description of our system. Looking at both policy and personnel in the new administration, the cynical Russian (or American) would have to work overtime lately to see where exactly significant change is in the offing and why the description in the passage above is supposed to be wrong. Perhaps the Kremlin actually admires the ability to engage in such a theatrical display to promote the illusion of dramatic political shifts while not changing anything fundamental. It is something of an art form, I grant you, and we have been practicing it much longer than they have, and it is not hard to see why a political establishment would want to learn how to imitate it. It is certainly curious way to frame Russian criticism of the American system by attacking the role of family dynastic politics and oligarchic cronies, but then I suppose the purpose is probably to try to minimize the differences between the two countries.

Even so, consider how debased and broken-down our standards must be that we consider it some kind of vindication of popular government that the two clans that have held executive power for the last twenty years did not happen to have a blood relative on either presidential ticket. Then we would remember that this was to some extent an accident on the Democratic side (had Clinton made any serious effort in the caucus states in early February, the “story line” above would have been almost entirely vindicated), and it was true on the Republican side perhaps only because of the unusual degree of incompetence shown by the current office-holder. Had Bush not been judged an utter failure as early as late 2006, how many of us really think that his brother would have stayed out of the presidential race? Except for his brother’s ruined reputation, how many think he would not have been seriously considered for a VP slot? Remember that a majority of the GOP still approves of George W. Bush even now–imagine what his approval rating among Republicans would have been had he not been quite as disastrous as he was! Does anyone believe that, between his establishment ties and governing record, Jeb Bush could not have won the nomination, had it not been for the great incompetence of his brother? For that matter, does anyone think that a relative outsider such as Obama would have stood a chance of winning the nomination of his party had it not been for the calamitous Bush Era and the complicity of so many leading Democrats in its calamities? Consider how fully this administration had to fail and how deeply unpopular Bush himself had to become to render the Russian “story line” invalid where it might have otherwise been all too accurate, and then tell me that there is not something rotten in our politics.

It seems to me that one of the greatest dangers of the last two electoral cycles is that it will nourish the illusion that our political system self-corrects and is functioning more or less as it is supposed to be functioning, when we should notice instead how atypical the last two cycles have been when compared to the rest of the previous twenty years. The point is not to deny the existence of real grassroots political activism, nor is it to say that such activism is entirely ineffective, nor is it to say that the fix is completely in, but it is to draw attention to a serious malady in our political system, which is, as Glenn Greenwald has observed recently, becoming increasingly inbred and nepotistic. There are families with entrenched power and disproportionate influence in both parties, and this is corrosive and unhealthy for our politics. There is something that rings a bit hollow when we keep hearing that the elite is a meritocracy (leaving aside for the moment how that merit is defined) and then we see political dynasties becoming more and more prevalent. That would be bad enough on its own, and we haven’t even begun to discuss here the question of the oligarch cronies.

Leon Hadar draws attention to a Financial Timespost that I had wanted to discuss earlier. The ongoing efforts of the urban middle, or upper-middle, class in Thailand to force a change to the structure of Thailand’s legislature to minimize the influence of poor, rural populations are a fascinating modern example of liberal backlash against democracy, an attempt to have liberal political institutions that also give significantly different weight to different classes of citizens. The coup against Thaksin provided the decisive rupture in the normal political process that created the opportunity to try to roll back mass democracy. Unlike previous episodes in modern history, the mass democratic movement appears for the moment to be losing to the more mobilized, coordinated urban liberals. Some may object that the bourgeoisie here is not really liberal, but merely a self-interested elite. I don’t see any necessary contradiction here.

What is interesting and different about this case is that there is not a landed aristocracy or any old guard conservative magnates who are willing to ally with the rural and poor population, as happened time and time again during the democratization of many different European countries. It was frequently a practice of anti-liberals in the late 19th century to expand the franchise to lower class people as a way of undermining the power of liberal parties, which drew their strength overwhelmingly from urban middle-class merchants and professionals. The latter were very political active and engaged, and more important they were of sufficient means to be allowed to participate in the electoral process; they were also not very numerous. Expanding the electorate was bound to dilute liberal power, because the majority did not particularly benefit, at least not directly, from liberal policies. In Austria, this was entirely successful, perhaps far more successful than the conservatives wanted, as Christian Socialism and Social Democracy overwhelmed the liberals after conservative elites empowered the countryside and the expanding population of workers in Vienna. Defenders of the privileges of landed elites were able to join together with non-German ethnic groups, farmers and workers, all of whom were clearly put at a disadvantage or otherwise alienated by the policies the liberals enacted during their brief post-1867 stint in power. In the aftermath of their fall from power, the Freisinnigen were reduced to a rump and their members for the most part either embraced social democracy or some form of pan-German nationalism (incidentally, the modern FPOe is more or less the direct inheritor of the latter tendency).

In Thailand, as in Austria and many other modernizing states, the urban middle class allies itself to the monarch, but unlike Austria this is not an alliance of desperation and last resort. Like Franz-Josef, King Bhumibol probably believes it is his duty to protect his people from their government, but I would guess that the King would not be terribly distressed if the forces that helped bring Thaksin to power are constrained by the new proposed rules for the legislature.

Rick Warren expands on the targeted assassination Gospel:

Am I advocating something dark, evil or something righteous?…Well, actually, the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped…. In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers.

I would like to say that this is an atypical example of misunderstanding the Apostle’s claims in Romans about obeying secular magistrates and recognizing their authority to punish evildoers, but I imagine that it is all too common. The statement in Romans presupposes that a secular magistrate has legitimate authority over those whom he punishes, which obviously does not apply to political leaders in other states. The entire discussion takes for granted that foreign political leaders are to be treated as criminals, and that they should be targeted for assassination because they are considered to be evil-doers under the authority of our government. There are several reasons why this is a dangerous claim, but more important it is an obviously false claim.

Freddie summons his inner Kennan:

This is going to necessarily depend a lot on perspective, of course, but I think a huge amount of our foreign policy vision is predicated on assumptions that are radical; our people, meanwhile, don’t understand their radicalism.

Kennan wrote something similar in Russia Leaves the War, quoted by Lukacs in his biography of Kennan, referring to “that curious law which so often makes Americans, inveterately conservative at home, the partisans of radical change everywhere else.” Given his domestic interests, this “law” must annoy Freddie even more than it annoys me, but Freddie is getting at the same truth in his remarks above. This is related to something else that Lukacs observed about Kennan:

Unlike many Americans, George Kennan did not believe that the United States was A Chosen Nation of God, that its people were a Chosen People, or even the Last Best Hope of Mankind; but he believed that there is something unique in the history of every nation, including his own; and that the Cold War, though it had not been started by the United States, revealed some of the unhappy traits of the American mind”: a willful ignorance beneath which there was something worse, a kind of national self-adulation.

The drive for radical change everywhere else–this is a broader, but more accurate, description of what I was trying to say when I referred to pro-invasion arguments that took for granted that “our government essentially has the right to shape and dominate the politics of other parts of the world and to use force to quash resistance to its efforts.” We seek this radical change partly because we do not really understand the world and want to make it more like ourselves, and partly because it gives us an occasion to celebrate ourselves. Both are ultimately a function of pride, but this is then formalized into an entire mythology, capped off by tales of the importance of Pax Americana. The war in Iraq has been a particularly blunt, cruel application of this pursuit of radical change, but it is the pursuit of such change that led Wilson to send our men into the slaughterhouse of WWI, inspired the creation of the Great Society on the Mekong and which has propelled the Second Inaugural’s ideas of American-led global democratic revolution. Obama referred to the “mindset that led to war” in his early primary speeches on Iraq. That mindset is that the world is ours to do with as we please, and anyone who says differently is aligned with malign forces that wish us ill. This radical change is necessarily violent and aimed at the destruction or dramatic reorganization of other polities. Boundaries will be redrawn as we wish (e.g., Kosovo), regimes will be overthrown, and foreign populations will be thrown into upheaval, and it will be an article of faith that everyone affected (except perhaps the dead) are better off. The striking thing is that this is considered to be well within the bounds of normal, respectable, sane discourse, and critiques of these views are considered to be ramblings of a wild and woolly-minded fringe.

Freddie’s remarks here are right on target:

What Americans consider moderation in foreign policy, in comparison with other countries and the history of our country and others, is wildly militaristic, expansionistic and aggressive.

If Bacevich’s thesis in The Limits of Power is correct, and I think it is, this is becoming more the case as time goes on (this is related to the problems of autonomy and consumption discussed in earlier posts today):

The collective capacity of our domestic political economy to satisfy those appetites has not kept pace with demand. As a result, sustaining our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness at home requires increasingly that Americans look beyond our borders. Whether the issue at hand is oil, credit, or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life.

The resulting sense of entitlement has great implications for foreign policy. Simply put, as the American appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire. The connection between these two tendencies is a causal one. In an earlier age, Americans saw empire as the antithesis of freedom. Today, as illustrated above all by the Bush administration’s efforts to dominate the energy-rich Persian Gulf, empire has seemingly become a prerequisite of freedom.

I would stress that this only seems to be the case, and that it is illusory, because it remains true that empire and liberty are and always will be incompatible. The former eats and annihilates the latter, substituting for it in our own time autonomy, comfort and indulgence. Another part of Bacevich’s thesis is that autonomy erodes our understanding of citizenship and makes the project of empire unsustainable in the long term, but it is in the nature of such projects that they can live long beyond the time when they should have faded away.

A host of people have responded negatively to Rod’s latest column, particularly this part:

Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism. Our families and communities have fragmented, in part because we have embraced an ethic of extreme individualism. Climate change and a peak in oil production threaten our future because we have been irresponsible caretakers of the natural world and its resources. At best, the religious right stood ineffectively against these trends. At worst, we preached them, mistaking consumerism for conservatism.

All political problems, traditional conservatism teaches, are ultimately religious problems because they result from disordered souls. In the era now dawning, Americans will learn again to live within limits — and together.

It is remarkable how vehemently some conservatives have reacted against this passage. Do any of them really disagree that “Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism”? Would they really deny that we have a culture that celebrates unfettered materialism? They might reasonably deny that they personally celebrate unfettered materialism, but Rod was speaking generally. Instead of taking seriously an exhortation to self-criticism and reflection, Rod’s critics have, as usual, resorted to whining.

Andrew Stuttaford recited some standard libertarian lines and observed that Tory patricians from the 19th century would have had a good laugh at this. Yes, when I want reliable advice on moral reasoning Victorian Tories are certainly among my first choices for role models. In a post dubbing the first paragraph above to be the worst of the day, Robert Stacy McCain declared that he was not to blame for any of the problems in question, so apparently there’s no problem. Our secular friends were predictably mortified and invoked Jeffrey Hart, but no doubt they will object strenuously to any suggestion that they take moral and cultural problems less seriously than their religious counterparts.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Rod did not use the word soul here, but said instead that “all political problems are ultimately ethical problems because they result from disordered wills.” As far as religious conservatives are concerned, that is what he said, because how one’s will is directed is a matter of the soul’s health and its orientation toward or away from the Good, which is to say God. Consider next that since antiquity the right-ordering of the soul was taken as essential for rightly ordering the polis, and for the entire history of Christianity it has been a fundamental spiritual teaching of the Church that a well-ordered soul keeps its passions and appetites in check. Apparently all of this is supposed to count for nothing, because it intrudes on individual autonomy. That autonomy is really what Rod is critiquing, and the freedom of this autonomy is mainly the freedom of appetite and preference, which individualists mistake for genuine freedom.

I am going to assume that Rod’s critics all believe that men should avoid excess, practice moderation and cultivate restraint–unless, of course, that is all together too “Buddhist” for McCain–and that failure to do so will lead to the formation of vicious, self-destructive habits and actions not in accordance with natural law. This will in turn have deleterious effects on social and political order, and will ultimately work to the detriment of political liberty as appetites that are not held in check from within will be restrained from without. If self-control weakens or fails and natural institutions, such as the family and community, splinter, public authority will take up the slack and increase its power. When a culture of acquisition and consumption financed by vast sums of debt begins to implode, public authority intervenes again to impose regulation (or, in many cases, over-regulation) where license previously prevailed.

We have been living in a culture that encourages the deferral of responsibility, and to one degree or another most of us have participated in it, and this is inconsistent with sustaining ordered liberty. Those who have not participated in this culture, or have done so only a little, should be the least offended by what Rod is saying, because his words are not directed at them. To the extent that we are all paying the price for an era of profligacy, what he says is relevant for all of us.

As you all probably know by now, there is a new blog for secular conservatives called Secular Right. That’s fine as far as it goes, but at the same time I don’t quite see the point. If the point is to say that non-believers and secular people can be conservatives, too, that seems to be something in no need of demonstration or argument. As I have noted before, and I will say again, Russell Kirk could identify conservatism in Santayana, and we might find many other skeptics and secularists as we look back. Having granted that, one would like to see some of these secular conservatives acknowledge more often that respect for a transcendent moral order is an integral part of the conservative mind and some recognition that such an order would have to have been established by God. If the point of the project is to say that modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary, I will have to laugh, because here our secular friends will have then embraced a popular myth that does not have much in the way of evidence to support it. If it is simply to argue for inclusion among other conservatives, I haven’t seen many efforts to cast them or keep them out.

I will repeat what I said a couple years ago when I was objecting to the fad of skeptical and secular conservatives lamenting the tremendous power of religious conservatism and alleged over-reliance on revealed religion:

Of course, it’s true that people of conservative temperament need not have any religion, and it’s also true that conservatism has never strictly been tied to a particular set of religious claims. As a modern and post-Revolutionary phenomenon, conservatives have often eschewed or transcended confessional labels. The good, old days of the Holy Alliance were wonderfully ecumenical and not tied to any particular orthodoxy. Some even say that one of the chief characteristics of conservatism is that it is a kind of social and political thought that need not have much to do with orthodoxy, and a brief glance over The Conservative Mind would seem to confirm that with a parade of a number of theologically latitudinarian and non-religious gentlemen (Paul Elmer More and Santayana being the ones that leap to mind immediately). Bolingbroke was a forerunner of the skeptical conservative, and Humean skepticism is sometimes considered a source of British conservative thought. It has been to my own dismay that the general acquaintance of most high conservative thought with the substance of theology has been limited at best, and it is partly for that reason that I proposed reimagining conservatism in terms of the patristic thought of our Christian tradition.

But the typical conservative assumption that man is fallible and not perfectible by human means is tied inextricably to the Christian understanding of the Fall. The skeptical man will say that this is not necessarily so, and that any fool can see that man is fallible without recourse to a doctrine of ancestral sin. But that doctrine is the only thing that makes sense of the predicament of man that preserves the possibility of true meaning. With the Fall, there is also Redemption. With mere fallibility, there is no remedy and so, ultimately, no hope in this world or the next. Further, the detachment of conservative thought from the Christian roots that nourished it in the first place is both a losing proposition and an abandonment of a sizeable part of the patrimony we have received from our fathers. Put simply, without a theological vision (and our tradition points us towards the theological vision of our civilisation’s Faith) conservatives have no meaningful vision of the good life and can only cavil and harumph at liberal, meliorist plans on the grounds of their impracticability rather than for their fundamental spiritual error and hubris. Without such a vision of consecrated order, ordained by God, conservatism becomes obsessed entirely with what is immanent and cannot form any coherent statements about who man is or what his purpose is supposed to be.

If secular conservatives have “pride in Western Civilization,” as Derbyshire puts it, they cannot very well ignore or deride as nonsense the central religious inspiration of that entire civilization, which is Christianity. Are they obliged to accept revealed truths? No, but they can and should pay due respect to the revelation that animated Western societies for most of their history and the traditions of our ancestors that have been tested over time and which have endured to become established customs. If all they are asking for is to “play in the band,” as Derbyshire says, no one is telling them that they cannot.

I wasn’t aware of this but now that I am, the Dish will refer to Mumbai by its previous name. ~Sullivan

This is, if anything, even sillier than complaining about using the name Myanmar. Contra Hitchens, Myanmar is not a “fake” name. It is another name for Burma in Burmese, used when referring to the country in writing, and the fact that it was adopted as the official name by a military junta should not necessarily make it the “wrong” name. The name Bombay was itself the invention of the Portugese that caught on and became institutionalized in the colonial period, and the city has been called Mumbai by speakers of some dialects for quite a while. As Hitchens’ own colleague Chris Beam at Slate wrote a couple years ago:

Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati, the local languages, have always called the city Mumbai.

So really all one is doing by refusing to use the new name is to privilege other dialects over Marathi and Gujarati. Now that‘s a powerful statement.

What is sillier still is to act as if refusing to use Myanmar matters. You are not freeing one dissident or aiding one protester against the junta by doing this; it is a show of solidarity that doesn’t even express solidarity, but simply makes you feel as if you have taken a stand when all you are doing is continuing a habit. The same goes double for Mumbai. You are not making the BJP weaker by your refusal; Shiv Sena is not going to disband out of fear of your mighty refusal. No one is obliged to use the new names, of course, and many don’t, but could we at least not pretend that by refusing the new name we are doing anything meaningful?

Presumably Istanbul should remain Istanbul by Hitchens’ standards, since it was officially renamed by a secularist, despite the rupture with the city’s past the newer official name represents. The change was a symbolic break with the Ottomans, but simply formalized a colloquial name of the city, which is similar to what happened in India. Should we all go back to calling a certain famous city on the Volga Tsaritsyn rather than the neutral Volgograd to show that we are calling it by its “right” name? I doubt Hitchens’ great scruples over using “the right name” would apply here, nor would they have applied to any of dozens of Eurasian cities previously renamed for various thugs and partisans of Hitchens’ political persuasion.

Update: A Mumbai local sets Andrew straight.

I’ll confess that I have no idea what this means, but if anyone needs a comic playwright I believe Noah Millman is available.