Alan Jacobs

I have watched the mailbox anxiously for your story. (You see the mailbox has not lost its potency; it is still the little cold tin womb in which the world makes me a little present from time to time of another installment of my life.)

— Saul Bellow, letter to Melvin Tumin (1942)

This year, America observes the fiftieth anniversary of many transformative events.  Some are to be celebrated; others are to be mourned. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama celebrated the march in Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, the landing of the first combat troops in Vietnam, and the signing of the Social Security Act. Yet in the midst of these anniversaries, it is important to remember an event that transformed America and affected the lives of many around the world:  the signing of the most significant immigration law in US history, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.

Tony Tian-Ren Lin

“Ginny!” said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. “Haven’t I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

— Arthur Weasley, after learning that his daughter is on Twitter

This essay by Elizabeth Stoker Breunig is several things: a memoir, a moving tribute to a teacher, a celebration of Pope Francis, a denunciation of Pope Francis’s critics — and an attempt to describe conservatism.

One might have thought the last a bridge too far for an essay of fewer than 5000 words, but Stoker Breunig shows no hesitation. In order to define and dismiss conservatism, she briefly cites two essays by conservatives, then overrules conservative self-undestanding by briefly quoting a theologian — a smart one, I must admit, Alastair Roberts, though he’s wrong about the matter cited — and then (decisively!) Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. This eventually leads to the peroration:

Conservatives inside the Church and out will, in all likelihood, continue to rankle at Francis’s presence, his persona, his wildly successful evangelism. With every word, he offers an obviously superior approach to theirs, one that renders the conservative disposition as unappealing as it is impossible.

Well, there we have it! Pope Francis: “wildly successful,” “obviously superior”; the Pope’s critics and indeed “the conservative disposition” tout court: “unappealing” and “impossible.” (Not sure what “impossible” can plausibly mean in this context, but I suspect it’s not a compliment.) Done and done! And it’s not even tea-time.

Ross Douthat has already pointed out, in response to Stoker Breunig’s article, that even the conservative Catholic critics of Francis come in several distinct varieties from several distinct intellectual traditions; but I would be surprised if Stoker Breunig were to take this point as seriously as it deserves. Her inclination to cite Corey Robin as an authority in these matters is not a good sign, given the blitheness with which he waves away distinctions — “I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably” — in order to define conservatism with a lack of charity that seems to have provided a model for her own tone: “That is what conservatism is: a meditation on — and theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Not “This is a recurrent element in conservatism” or “This is an eternal temptation for conservatism, to which it all too often succumbs” — statements that would have the double merit of charity and accuracy — but “This is what conservatism is.”

Sad to say, I’ve already seen a number of responses from the right to Stoker Breunig’s essay that make her argument seem open-minded and gracious — maybe I’ll get to those in another post, though they’re too repulsive for me to want to think about them further. But it was curious to me how many of them focused on her youth, as though that were somehow disqualifying. It isn’t. But in any case, as I read the essay I didn’t think of the author’s youth because, to me, it did not seem to stem from a youthful mind. It closed doors, rather than opening them; it treated ancient and fundamental questions about the political life as though they were (“obviously”) settled; it dismissed people whose judgments differ from the author’s with a rhetorical wave of the hand (“unappealing”), not bothering to inquire into what those judgments’ best representatives think or why they think it. The essay seems to me to be afflicted by the impatience with other points of view that I associate with old age. Its greatest flaw, in its treatment of conservatism anyway, is its utter lack of intellectual curiosity.

I did not know Richard John Neuhaus intimately, or even well; we met only a couple of times, and corresponded a bit over the years. But I was involved with his magazine, First Things, for a long time, and read almost everything he wrote, and talked often about him with mutual friends. So I was excited when Randy Boyagoda’s biography of Father Neuhaus appeared, last month, and I read it as soon as I could. It’s a superb work, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the varying intersections of religion and politics, especially in America during the second half of the twentieth century and the first years of this one.

The book has been widely reviewed already, and I want to zero in on a couple of those reviews because I think they raise some important issues about Neuhaus and about those “intersections” I just mentioned. The first is by Jeet Heer and the second is by Damon Linker.

For Heer, Neuhaus was a “holy hustler,” a hypocrite: “when religion and politics clashed, Neuhaus chose politics…. Toeing the Republican party line seems to have mattered more to Neuhaus than bearing witness to the life and words of Christ…. Neuhaus tailored his Christianity to match GOP dogma, often wilfully ignoring mainstream Christian theology and even the plain meaning of the gospels.” (For Heer “mainstream Christian theology and even the plain meaning of the gospels” seem to be about “reproductive freedom, environmentalism, feminism and gay rights.” But never mind.)

Linker’s view of Neuhaus is expressed more gently but does not greatly differ: Neuhaus “decided to lend his considerable talents to encouraging the folly” of a political party that thinks and acts “like a church.” The general lesson he draws from Neuhaus’s support for the Bush administration’s foreign policy, and for the Republican party more generally, is this: “When philosophical, theological, or historical ideas are blended with political passions and convictions, the result is very often a species of propaganda.”

Linker focuses on the Neuhaus of the early 21st century, because that’s when the two men worked together; Heer — and this may explain the angrier tone — reads Neuhaus’s later career as a betrayal of his early work as a political radical. (At one point during the Johnson administration Neuhaus said that the Vietnamese people were “God’s instrument for bringing the American empire to its knees.”) But there is a general picture of Neuhaus that both men share: he was a man who, possibly because of a love of power and influence, mixed religion and politics so thoroughly that he sacrificed the integrity of his theological and moral convictions, and lost the ability to bear politically-independent witness to Christian truth.

I don’t agree with this interpretation of Neuhaus, but in this post I’m not going to contest it. Instead, I want to assume, per argumentum, that it’s true. What then? What comes then, I think, is the question of how and why Neuhaus took this route. Linker doesn’t ask the question in his review, though he raises it in his book The Theocons; Heer just assumes that he knows the answer: Neuhaus’s lust for power. But that doesn’t explain why Neuhaus turned right; after all, he could have sought influence with the Carter administration, or later with the Clinton, and climbed the ladder of influence more quickly. So why did he make the political turn he did, when he did?

Some of the answers are in Boyagoda’s biography, for those willing to seek them out.

In 1961 Neuhaus was the pastor of a Lutheran church in Brooklyn with an overwhelmingly black congregation, and he did almost all his pastoral work among poor black people. To supplement his extremely meager pastoral salary he took a job as a hospital chaplain, and one day he came home from that job and wrote a letter to his dear friend Robert Wilken:

I just saw “baby boy Washington” enter life with a cry. He does not yet know how much he will have to cry about. His mother is unmarried and does not want him. He will be turned over to the city for a life of not being wanted. This is true for more than one third of all the hundreds of babies delivered here. I don’t think his prospects are very good for finding love, happiness, joy, purpose.... I am not depressed — only filled with wonder. Wonder at the glory and tragedy of life in this city. In a little while I will drive home and can count on being struck again by the New York skyline — a never failing object of adoration. The city and the potential of the civilization it represents — to this I am religiously committed. And to the ways of the God who brought it into being. “What is man, that you keep him in mind?” Little baby boy Washington — fear not, He has redeemed you. He has called you by the name you do not yet have, you are His! I cannot guarantee you that this is true. It may be a pious illusion. But it is better than what is called the truth by men, but just must be illusion. You are not alone.

Neuhaus believed that God “brings into being” each of those whom Jesus calls “the least of these”; that God calls them to Himself, redeems them — that God loves the unloved and unwanted; that every life, including life in the womb, is immeasurably precious to Him. In the 1960s he was a man of the left because he knew that the left was populated by many religious believers (Jewish as well as Christian) and because he thought that even the irreligious had in their secular way a care for “the least of these” that resembled his own.

Boyagoda shows very clearly that as the Sixties moved into the Seventies Neuhaus found his allies moving farther and farther away from him. The religious left became less and less willing to challenge even the grossest injustices and abuses if they emerged from their own end of the political spectrum. In 1975, “when he and a few others tried — and failed — to win broad support among his leftist colleagues for a public condemnation of the new Communist government in Vietnam because of its broad human rights abuses and specific targeting of religious minorities, he knew it was really over: for his onetime allies, leftist political solidarity trumped concerns over the higher dictates of religious freedom and human dignity.”

Moreover, the left with increasing insistence severed the cause of the poor from the cause of the unborn — something Neuhaus found tragic. Boyagoda again: “By the early 1970s Neuhaus began to understand his commitment to the rights of the poor and the racially oppressed as of a piece with his commitment to the rights of the unborn, which would occupy an ever greater primacy in the coming years. From the beginning, however, this integration of rights for the poor and rights for the unborn placed him at a critical distance from a Left in which private rights — made possible by and indeed protecting implicit race and class privileges — trumped responsibilities for others.”

The point needs emphasis: not just the unborn were at risk from the left’s changing direction. In the 1970s Neuhaus wrote, as quoted by Boyagoda with clarifying brackets,

A distinguished medical proponent of abortion on demand once assured me that no one should be forced to be born who was not guaranteed “the minimal requirements for a decent existence” [essentially, the standard family, education, and economic elements of secure and stable middle-class American life]. When I [Neuhaus] pointed out that, by his criteria, most of the people I work with in Brooklyn should have been aborted in the womb, he responded with utmost sincerity, “But surely many, if not most, of the people who live in our horrible slums would, if they could be objective about it, agree with me that it would have been better for them not to have been born.”

So much for baby boy Washington, beloved of the Lord. Boyagoda rightly notes that this encounter “afforded [Neuhaus] his most visceral sense of why he could no longer be a clergyman of the Left.” Thus his long slow turn towards the right, towards the Republican party, where, Neuhaus came to believe, the moral language he thought essential could still be heard, as it no longer could in the Democratic party. (Thus also, though it’s not my subject here, his eventual move into Catholicism.)

Fast-forward a few years, to Neuhaus’s attempt to influence the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. When Bush professed reluctance to “lead with the abortion question” because of its political volatility, Neuhaus responded,

”The only way of preventing it from becoming the lead question is to settle it securely with your supporters to whom it matters most.” Here Neuhaus turned openly strategic: “Let me urge you as strongly as I can to view the pro-life position not only as a moral imperative but as a big political plus,” which he detailed by citing polling data that pointed to ultimately limited and soft support for hard-line abortion policies, which in turn would provide “a great advantage to any leader firmly and articulately supportive of the goal: ‘Every unborn child protected in law and welcomed in life.’” Having underlined this statement in his letter to Bush — who would use it repeatedly in his future presidency to articulate his pro-life policy goal — Neuhaus concluded by offering his prayers, and an offer of further assistance should Bush seek it.

And this, from an endnote:

After recalling their 1998 breakfast meeting, in which Bush assured Neuhaus of the strength and quality of his pro-life commitments, Neuhaus called it a decision that would “define the relationship of your Administration and of the Republican Party to the Catholics of America or at least to the great majority of those who are observant Catholics — and to prolife Americans more generally.” Thereafter, he issued a blunt warning to Bush, that even if “Catholics and prolife Americans have nowhere else to go in national politics” than the Republican Party, as Neuhaus knew some of Bush’s counselors were suggesting, “if you endorse the taking of innocent human lives, these people, and I with them, will lose their enthusiasm for your Administration and the Party.”

With all this in mind, here’s (a simplified version of) my reading of Neuhaus’s political transformation: Over time he came to believe that the American left had effectively abandoned its commitment to “the least of these,” had decided that, in Boyagoda’s clear formulation, “private rights — made possible by and indeed protecting implicit race and class privileges — trumped responsibilities for others.” The moral language that he had learned from his Christian upbringing and pastoral training and experience simply had no purchase in a party dominated by a commitment solely to the “private rights” of self-expression, especially sexual self-expression. He turned to those who showed a willingness to hear commitments expressed in that moral language, who appeared to be open to being convinced. In return he gave them his loyalty, his public support, for the rest of his life.

It may well be that this was a devil’s bargain, one that Neuhaus should never have made. Indeed, I am (most days, anyhow) inclined to think that it was. He who would sup with the Devil must bring a long spoon, and Father Neuhaus’s spoon wasn’t nearly long enough. He did enjoy rather too much the perks and privileges of influence; he did, all too often, turn a blind eye to the immense faults of the institutions to which he had pledged his loyalty.

But I think we have strong documentary evidence that Father Neuhaus made his bargain out of a genuine and deeply compassionate love — a love that pulled him all his life — for those whom the world deems worthless. In trying to realize this love in the medium of politics, that cesspool of vainglory and vanity, he sometimes befouled himself. But we all befoul ourselves; few of us do it in such a noble cause.

Today I tweeted, “Okay that Twitter says it will deal better with abuse, but policies are only as good as their implementation. I left @flickr because they wouldn’t even respond when I was being harassed, in plain violation of their ToS. So policies as such are empty.” (FYI, I tell a very brief version of my experience with Flickr’s unresponsiveness in this post. And you can read more about Twitter’s new policies here.)

A few minutes later I got this response:

@ayjay Hi Alan, We take ToS violations very seriously and investigate every report. Can you Follow/DM us with more details on the situation?

— Yahoo Customer Care (@YahooCare) March 13, 2015

 

I followed, and provided the old case number. But all I got in return was a link to a page for reporting abuse — something I did a long time ago. So I replied, “Well, I already did report the abuse. And nothing was done. So basically you’re asking me to start over. If you folks want to do customer care, you can pick up the ball where you dropped it.” Flickr’s reply? “Thanks for helping us to make Flickr a safer place! We really appreciate it!”

In other words, a big fat middle finger extended right in my face. Publicly, Flickr expressed concern and responsibility; privately they mocked me.

This is what I mean when I say that stated policies mean absolutely nothing — indeed, in some cases, as with Flickr, they are PR ruses designed to hide total irresponsibility. (And remember, I was a paying customer of Flickr when they they couldn’t be bothered to address the abuse. Twitter has no paying customers, and no real competitors either.) I see absolutely no reason to believe that Twitter will do anything to curb the torrents of abuse that afflict so many of its users, especially women. I’d be happy to be proven wrong; I don’t expect to be.

I may have said enough on Twitter about Rachel Marie Stone’s post on contraception and Margaret Sanger, but it’s hard to be perfectly clear on Twitter, so let me spell out my thoughts here.

First: the post’s title suggests that it’s a defense of contraception, but Stone described it on Twitter as a defense of Margaret Sanger. It would have been a better post if it had tried to do one of those things rather than both. Sanger is an immensely controversial figure — especially among evangelical and Catholic Christians, thanks to the leading role the organization Sanger created, Planned Parenthood, plays in providing abortions — so it is rhetorically disastrous, in a blog post written for a Christian magazine, to link advocacy of contraception to a defense of Sanger. As Stone’s post shows, we have in the lives of poor families around the world more immediate and convincing evidence for the value of contraception. Why bring Sanger into it? Her presence won’t reassure those already sympathetic, and will surely alienate those who doubt.

Unless defending Sanger, as Stone’s tweet suggests, is the main point. If so, then there’s another problem. Stone writes, “Sanger, like many medical professionals in her day, did hold eugenicist ideas. Eugenics were enshrined into compulsory sterilization laws in many U.S. states and supported by organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I do not mean to excuse Sanger for holding these views, but I do want to give the charge of ‘eugenicist’ a more complete background.” I’m not sure what Stone means by “a more complete background,” but this statement seems rather evasive — and that leads me (or will, eventually) to what I think is an especially important point.

Sanger wasn’t “charged” with being a eugenicist — she warmly claimed the title and devoted much of her long and highly energetic life to advocating for the elimination of the “unfit.” Indeed, a thorough reading of Sanger’s works suggests that her devotion to contraception was merely instrumental to the greater cause of cleansing American society of people she thought unworthy of life. When New York University released its Margaret Sanger Papers Project, David Tell summarized what those papers teach us about Sanger’s eugenicist and racist views:

Sanger did, in fact, endorse the federal government’s post-World War I immigration restrictions, during a Vassar College speech on “racial betterment” in February 1924, and she was “glad” the laws were “drastic” enough to help control “the quality of our population.” She worried, though, about the “increasing race of morons” already on our shores, and expressed disgust that the American people should be taxed to fund welfare spending for the “maintenance and perpetuation of these undesirables.” When we consider that “a moron’s vote is as good as an intelligent, educated, [thinking] citizen,” Sanger advised, “we well pause and ask ourselves: ‘Is America really safe for Democracy?’”

Sanger did, indeed, call the “morons” who so disgusted her “human weeds”; it’s there on page 386, and the book’s editors tell us she “often” employed the analogy. And she did, too, believe that “ethnic community” was something the race-betterment gardener should want to consider when he was trying to decide which “weeds” to attack with his hoe. “The Jewish people and Italian families,” she complained to the New York State legislature in 1923, “are filling the insane asylums” and “hospitals” and “feeble-minded institutions,” and it was wrong that taxpayers should have to subsidize the “multiplication of the unfit” this way. Better that the state should save its money “to spend on geniuses.”

At one point, Sanger classified eighty-five million Americans as “mediocre to imbecile.” At another, she proposed a total, five-year, nationwide moratorium on childbirth.

What I want to note about this summary — chilling enough in itself — is what it tells is about Sanger’s place in American culture, especially in the heyday of her influence (especially the 1920s). Sanger did not just “hold eugenicist ideas”; she was one of our nation’s most passionate and widely-respected advocates for those ideas. She’s speaking at Vassar, addressing the New York State Legislature, giving speeches around the country, writing popular books — including one in which she wrote, “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” Indeed, Sanger may have done more than any other single person to keep “scientific racism,” eugenicism, and persecution of the disabled in the main stream of America thought.

It was this ceaseless, tireless, and very successful advocacy for some very nasty beliefs and practices that sets Sanger apart from others who happened to “hold eugenicist ideas.”

In this respect we might compare Sanger to someone like George Wallace: racism was horribly widespread in the South in Wallace’s time, but unlike the people who simply breathed it in through the cultural air, he celebrated it, exacerbated it, and relentlessly incited and fanned the flames of race hatred. Few today would attempt to renew and defend populist politics by looking to the example of George Wallace. Maybe Wallace did have some good policies; maybe he wrenched some power away from the 1% of Alabama and empowered the (white) working class. Maybe; but who cares? Nor should anyone care: he hitched his wagon to the cause of a malicious and absolutist racism, and deserves all the opprobrium he gets.

The same should be true of Margaret Sanger. Did she do some good? Indeed she did. But those who want to further the good things she achieved should treat her leading ideas, the ideas she devoted her greatest energies to spreading, with the utter contempt they deserve, not dismiss them as mere peccadilloes characteristic of her time and place. Nor should people who simply note what Sanger actually and repeatedly thought and said be accused of “demonizing” her — something that I’ve heard more than a few times in the last 24 hours. That’s a smokescreen and an evasion.

The cause of contraception would be far better served by simply ignoring Sanger; that would have the further merit of being merciful towards her.