Terrific and obviously true piece by my colleague, Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic. He points out that since the current offensive started, suicide bombings have indeed declined. He argues that the use of female suicide bombers, far from being some grotesque extension of the vocation, may be due to the fact that male suicide bombers keep getting intercepted by the Israeli security forces. Perhaps, you know, killing and detaining terrorists might actually help lower rates of terrorism. That’s why I hope the Israelis get out of the West Bank unilaterally, but take their time to root out as many of these thugs and murderers as they can while they do. In time, we may come to thank Sharon for doing the unpopular but necessary thing. He may be performing the equivalent of the Osirak bombing – taking out terrorist threats now that could one day threaten more than Israelis.
EPIPHANY WATCH I: A fascinating little interview with Christopher Hitchens is a good insight into how a man of the left deals with the pressures of orthodoxy, loyalty and the whole idea of what an intellectual actually is. I’m impressed by his candor, as always:
[S]ome of the best known of the American public intellectuals have, I think, failed the test of September 11th. And somewhere in there is the difference between having an oppositional stance-an “engaged” position-and possessing some elementary, I’m sorry to make it sound so banal, some elementary morals. Or sense of moral proportion.
I think that gets it just about right. And reminding people of a sense of moral proportion is not, pace Mr. Alterman, an exercise in McCarthyism. It is an exercise in conscience. But you can see the wheels turning in Hitch’s head, away from the easy oppositionism that afflicted – and still afflicts – so many in his intellectual generation:
I think it’s now quite possible, and I think this is what September 11th may have clarified, that, the Russian Revolution having been-I would say, in spite of many things, but, nonetheless-a historical failure, to put it mildly … the model revolution for this, I should think, will be increasingly that of 1776. In other words, the real question in front of us is, will the American experiment succeed or not? That being defined as: a multicultural, secular, multiethnic, pluralist democracy.
Quite. The threat to that pluralism today comes primarily from terrorists. But, more benignly, this pluralist order is also threatened by the ideological policemen of right and left, who insist on corralling writers into one camp or another, who cannot understand a thinker or writer who insists upon independence, or complexity, or even, when it’s warranted, a certain honest dose of human contradiction. As Hitch writes,
[A]t the moment, my mailbox is full of people effectively accusing me of that, of being a propagandist for George Bush, let’s say. It doesn’t worry me particularly for myself; but it worries me that so many people have been so poorly educated that they can think that was a good point, or a good method of reasoning, when it’s not really a method of reasoning at all.
Amen, Hitch. Ditto all those emails telling me either to join the right and condemn homosexuality or multiculturalism or married priests or drug legalization or whatever; or those insisting that a gay man has no right or standing to dissociate from the left, or must somehow support liberal ideas in toto or be accused of aiding and abetting the ‘enemy.’ Isn’t the real task of a writer to think for himself – and to resist the temptation to tidy everything into one ideological rubric? I’m glad Hitch is around. It makes the intellectual world a less lonely and more invigorating place.
EPIPHANY WATCH II: Here’s another rather sharp and honest discussion of how 9/11 accelerated in one academic’s life her sense that her profession had become horribly estranged from the real life and real questions that intellectuals should never lose sight of. But in some ways this brilliant essay by professor Lisa Ruddick at the University of Chicago is an epiphanal rebellion against the aridity of much that passes for thought in today’s English departments. She puts it well here:
When colleagues and graduate students who are teaching this term get together, the conversation often turns to the question how to bridge the chasm between the syllabus–whatever it contains–and the students who are looking for help in figuring out how to sustain a humane connection to a world that’s overwhelming them. I listen to these conversations, then I look at recent issues of scholarly journals in my field, and I feel as if I’m in two different worlds.
Is this the voice of a recovering post-structuralist? I’ve long believed the sheer philosophical, spiritual and intellectual hollowness of this fad would eventually break down. So it’s wonderful to read a first-hand account of how this can happen:
When I was writing my first book I was so concerned about getting tenure that I adhered to the theoretical norms of the moment. It was alienating at times, but I did it. After that, though, I became paralyzed, because I couldn’t make myself observe certain omnipresent intellectual taboos that came under the heading of poststructuralism-taboos that I thought were oppressive but that I couldn’t challenge without courting disgrace. I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about “what sustains people”-my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful. And my anger and sadness about this feeling of constraint were preventing me from writing with conviction at all.
‘Conviction,’ as Ruddick puts it. ‘A sense of moral proportion,’ as Hitchens has it. And in both, much hope for a more open and more truly liberal intellectual future.
THE THEOCON VISION FOR THE CHURCH – AND AMERICA: I wrote yesterday that I could forsee a schism between the American Catholic church and Rome, if major reform didn;t come soon. A reader sent me a link to someone else who clearly looks forward to the opposite scenario: the number of American Catholics falling by perhaps a third, but becoming solidified around an Opus Dei-inspired rump. This piece is by one Father McCloskey, an Opus Dei prelate who apparently converted Bob Novak and Larry Kudlow to a highly conservative form of Catholicism. The conceit of this “letter” is that it’s written in 2030, looking back on the crisis of the post-conciliar church and seeing how pruning it back to its hardcore led to a new “springtime” for vocations. McCloskey writes to his imaginary future correspondent:
As you may have learned, there were approximately 60 million nominal Catholics at the beginning of the Great Jubilee at the turn of the century. You might ask how we went from that number down to our current 40 million. I guess the answer could be, to put it delicately, consolidation. It is not as bad as it looks. In retrospect it can be seen that only approximately 10% of the sixty or so were “with the program.”
That “program” is, I think, the Opus Dei agenda for reversing the liberalization that has taken root since the Second Vatican Council. I think this piece is worth reading to see what a conservative vision of the future of the American church looks like, one in which every Catholic is either married and reproducing throughout their lives, in religious orders, or celibate. But then there’s this passage. McCloskey, w
ho is already a prominent contributor to the current debate about the church, and was one of five leading Catholics interviewed ten days ago on “Meet The Press,” sees American constitutional democracy as it now is as a real threat to the church, and envisages a second civil war that will lead to the secession from the Union of the more God-fearing states. No, I’m not kidding. Here’s the salient passage:
In retrospect, the great battles over the last 30 years over the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society. We finally received as a gift from God what had been missing from our ecclesial experience these 250 years in North America— a strong persecution that was a true purification for our “sick society.” The tens of thousands of martyrs and confessors for the Faith in North America were indeed the “seed of the Church” as they were in pre-Edict of Milan Christianity. The final short and relatively bloodless conflict produced our Regional States of North America. The outcome was by no means an ideal solution but it does allow Christians to live in states that recognize the natural law and divine Revelation, the right of free practice of religion, and laws on marriage, family, and life that reflect the primacy of our Faith. With time and the reality of the ever-decreasing population of the states that worship at the altar of “the culture of death,” perhaps we will be able to reunite and fulfill the Founding Fathers of the old United States dream to be “a shining city on a hill.”
This is the Catholic, Francoite version of the Christian Reconstructionists – and it lurks behind the purgers on the Catholic Right. This visceral disdain for modern America found expression not so long ago in Richard Neuhaus’s journal ‘First Things’ which toyed with the idea of armed rebellion against the American constitutional order because of the Godlessness and faithlessness of this country’s judiciary. This agenda, of course, has about as much chance of happening in this country as the current pope’s ending the celibacy requirement for priests. But it’s certainly helpful to see where some of these people are coming from. The fight for the soul of American Catholicism – against the Francoite reactionaries who see the current crisis as an opportunity for a benign take-over of the Church – could end up being a fight for American democracy as well.
ROMENESKO VERSUS BLOGS:Medianews’ Romenesko does what he can to trash andrewsullivan.com again – by linking to a blog! John Scalzi’s piece all but accuses this site and others of fibbing about our numbers. (Scalzi, it should be remembered is Ted Rall’s good friend.) Scalzi uses Norah Vincent’s equation of “hits” with “visits” to suggest that my daily visit numbers are perhaps one fifth of what I’ve reported. Here’s what my not fantastically sophisticated server tells me: last week, this site got 220,000 visits from 76,000 unique visitors. Our best day was Wednesday when we got 40,000 visits from 23,000 unique visitors. On a monthly basis, we’re now over 800,000 visits from over 200,000 unique visitors. Are we bigger than the New York Times? Of course not. But that’s not the right comparison. Better to compare a news service like Drudge with a news service like the Times. Scalzi says the Times gets 2.2 million visitors a week. According to his site, Drudge gets 4 million visits a day. Let’s be very conservative and say that amounts to 1 million unique visitors a day. I’d say Drudge beats the New York Times website hands down. Of course, he provides only a tiny fraction of their original reporting. But if you’re looking for news stories, his web-page clearly out-performs the Times, and on the web, a page is a page is a page. It seems to me the right comparison for opinion bloggers like Instapundit or yours truly would be either visits to individual columnists online or visits to opinion magazines. I’m pretty sure National Review Online beats us all. But I’d be interested to know if the online versions of the Nation or The New Republic beat individual bloggers by a large amount. And remember that our pages are staffed by one, rather than around a dozen or so. When you look at it that way, bloggers’ contribution to the debate – in a matter of months, really – is pretty astounding. But the broader point is: this is not a zero-sum game. The old media won’t disappear, nor should they. The Times, for all its flaws, is an absolutely indispensable institution, and I hope to God it stays that way. What bloggers do is break up smug monopolies, disperse editorial power and give unheard voices a chance to get a megaphone. It seems to me only the truly insecure or untalented have anything to worry about. (Which may account for Eric Alterman’s panic.)
The Dish 