In an article published in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, Martin Peretz attributed to Cornel West the view that every social encounter can be reduced to identity and power. Having not only read Professor West's writings, but also having taught with him at Princeton and discussed social, moral, and political issues with him countless times, both publicly and privately, I can say with certainty that this understanding of his views is a misunderstanding--a gross misunderstanding. So I sent a letter correcting Mr. Peretz to the WSJ. I've been waiting for it to be published, but it is now clear that the editors have decided not to publish it. So I am posting my letter here:
There is a form of leftism that “reduces every social encounter to identity and power,” but Martin Peretz (April 15, 2020, “Bookshelf”) is wrong in attributing that form to Cornel West. In fact, West’s deeply-held Christian faith, and his devotion to non-reductionist thinkers from Plato and St. Augustine to Martin Buber, Dorothy Day, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, precludes his embracing it. Although he does not hesitate to criticize what he regards as the unjust distribution or use of political and economic power, he is a critic, not a proponent, of the idea that human relationships are inevitably and decisively shaped by power--or identity. He is no disciple of Marx or Foucault. -- Robert P. George, Princeton University
Cornel West is a rich, complex, and fascinating thinker--one that people across the political and ideological spectrum can learn from. He is also a widely misunderstood figure. His critics, and sometimes even his allies, mistakenly think he is a conventional sort of leftist. He is certainly a man of the left. But he is certainly not conventional.
An example: West (like his left-wing Harvard colleague and teaching partner Roberto Unger) utterly rejects the "progressive view of history" that has been leftist orthodoxy at least since the time of Marx and which is conventional leftist thinking today. How many times have you heard Barack Obama, for example, claim that people who disagree with him about this or that issue are on "the wrong side of history"? How often have you heard other progressives invoke the "judgment" of history, as if history possessed deific powers to decide, and even define, what is good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust? West has no patience with this nonsense. He has no belief--in fact he rejects the belief--that history inevitably (or even likely) moves in the direction of greater justice, equality, freedom, respect for human dignity, or anything of the kind. And yet sometimes--as with the case of a television interviewer I saw a while back talking with West on a left-leaning news and opinion show--people assume that, as a leftist, he must believe it.
Why doesn't he believe it? Well, West's rejection of historical determinism, like his rejection of materialism and his rejection of the reduction of all social relations to identity and power, are grounded in his Christian commitments. This distinguishes him not only from secular progressives but also from many self-identified religious (including Christian) progressives who, whatever their personal devotional practices and self-identification, have abandoned the substance of Christian faith in favor of precisely the views of human nature, the human good, human dignity, human destiny, and history that divide secular progressivism, at the root, from Christianity. West is a socialist--though one that allows more room for the private sector and for civil society than is typical among contemporary socialists--but not a Marxist, not even an inchoate Marxist (or neo-Marxist), as many self-described "Christian socialists" are. Marx's materialism, historicism, and reduction of social relations to the class struggle ("identity and power"), as well, of course, as his atheism, are rejected, not embraced, by Cornel West.
On this day, in 1606, Henry Garnet, S.J. was hanged by St. Paul's Cathedral in London. (The crowd reportedly pulled on his legs, during the hanging, so that he would die before the usual disemboweling.) He was a student of Robert Bellarmine and had been, for some time, the head of the Jesuit mission in England, and he was executed for (in addition, of course, the offense of being a Jesuit in England) failing to reveal his (alleged) knowledge of some details of the "Gunpowder Plot." (In Macbeth, Shakespeare mocks Garnet, by reference, as the "equivocator.") Ora pro nobis.
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Saturday, May 2, 2020
In his essay, The Dead End of the Left: Augusto Del Noce’s Critique of Modern Politics, Carlo Lancelloti describes Del Noce's intervention into a debate between two well-known Catholic intellectuals of the time, one a representative of the "right" and another of the "left." Lancelloti includes an extended quotation from Del Noce, which I reproduce here not so much for the specific purposes that Del Noce or Lancelloti had in their writings, but because it arrestingly captures what has been happening at elite and not-so-elite universities in the United States for at least the last few decades:
If by “right” we mean faithfulness to the spirit of tradition, meaning the tradition that talks about an uncreated order of values, which are grasped though intellectual intuition and are independent of any arbitrary will, not even the divine one; and if by “left” we mean, on the contrary, the rejection not merely of certain historical superstructures but of those very values, which are “unmasked” to show their true nature as oppressive ideologies, imposed by the dominant classes in order to protect themselves, well, then it seems that in no other historical period has the left advanced so dramatically as during the last quarter of a century…. And yet, one has to say that Domenach is right: if by “right” we mean “management technique at the service of the strongest,” regardless of what ideologies are used to justify this management, we have to say that its victory has never been so complete, because it has been able to turn completely the culture of the left into its own tool.
Friday, May 1, 2020
Judge Justin Walker of the Western District of Kentucky was fairly criticized a few weeks ago for a lengthy and possibly unnecessary judicial disquisition on the law of religious freedom. Walker currently has a high profile because of a combination of his age, his apparent jurisprudential outlook, and his pending nomination to the D.C. Circuit. With a big target on his back, it's unsurprising that not all of the criticisms of him have been fair. But perhaps some are getting through.
Last week, Judge Walker held the Kentucky Billboard Act unconstitutional. Walker's opinion in L.D. Management Company v. Thomas (W.D. Ky. April 24, 2020) cannot be accused of running too long. It takes just six double-spaced pages for Walker to dispatch Kentucky's billboard law.
The opinion is a bit too quick and too confident at points, at least for my taste. Near the end, for example, Judge Walker suggests in passing that Kentucky Transportation officials "may have selectively policed the particular billboard in this case." The opinion states:
Lion's Den told Kentucky about other offending billboards on mobile structures and even provided photos of them. This evidence – which Kentucky filed in support of its summary judgment motion–raises a suspicion that Kentucky specifically targeted Lion's Den and ignored other billboards that broke its rules. If so, this selective enforcement is viewpoint discrimination, an even more 'egregious' violation of the First Amendment.
This seemed a bit gratuitous, especially for an opinion that otherwise moved with such economy of expression. So I pulled the evidence Walker seemed to be referring to. It was with Kentucky's summary judgment motion, but it was the _plaintiff's_ answers to interrogatories from the administrative enforcement action. And the relevant interrogatory answer included information that undercuts plaintiff's viewpoint discrimination claim. The answer states that counsel shared the photographs with the Transportation Cabinet, and then states, "It was only after that information was provided that the other signs began to be removed." (21-3, p. 142, Answer to Interrogatory 24) (emphasis added). This is pretty weak sauce, and reads a bit like piling on the defense.
On the merits, Judge Walker's decision very well may be correct. As he explains in his opinion, the Sixth Circuit last September held unconstitutional a Tennessee billboard law that the appellate court described as "identical" to Kentucky's. See Thomas v. Bright, 937 F.3d. 721, 732 (6th Cir. 2019). As a judge on a federal district court hierarchically inferior to the Sixth Circuit, Judge Walker is bound by the Sixth Circuit's ruling in Thomas. That decision was issued a couple of months before the defense filed for summary judgment. That filing did not mention Thomas, but instead relied heavily an a prior Sixth Circuit decision that theThomas panel held to have been overruled by the Supreme Court in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 135 S.Ct. 2218 (2015). That was a big omission.
If Kentucky appeals Judge Walker's decision, though, the appeal will not necessarily be DOA notwithstanding. The crux of Judge Walker's reasoning was that the Kentucky Billboard Act's distinction between signs advertising on-premises activities and those advertising off-premises activity rendered the law "content-based" and therefore subject to a strict First Amendment test. That determination tracked the Sixth Circuit's reasoning in Thomas. But Judge Walker also included a discussion of severability, concluding that Kentucky's on-premises/off-premises distinction was not severable from the other provisions of the Act and implementing regulations that the billboard at issue violated. The severability of a state law is a question of state law. The Sixth Circuit's severability discussion in Thomas is therefore not determinative of the severability even of an identically worded Kentucky law. For complicated reasons that don't belong in this already lengthy blog post, the inclusion of severability might not have been necessary either to the Sixth Circuit's decision in Thomas or Judge Walker's decision in this case. But there's more than enough to argue about that an appeal by Kentucky would not be futile.
Finally, the Sixth Circuit's decision in Thomas v. Bright might itself be wrong. That's not something Judge Walker could decide for himself, but the freedom that he took in deciding what issues to discuss might have been better channeled toward considering the nature and limits of the Sixth Circuit's holding in Thomas and the facts of the case before him rather than on other aspects of the opinion that he did include.
Over in this post at my other perch, I have some observations about what I perceive (anecdotally) as rising tensions in response to the Coronavirus-related shutdown orders and other government policies. It's not every day that a municipal Italian government threatens to shut down Mass, disperse the congregants, and force a mask on a priest (see the video). The words are in Italian, but I translate enough of the exchange to give a sense of the tension. There are tensions here in the US, too, and I talk about some of those as I've observed them, from a distance, in New York.
One of the things these conflicts has me thinking about is the psychologically powerful, but (in my view) highly problematic, pull or draw of equality as equal treatment. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said by others, but I find it interesting to observe that something of what they have said is working itself out in especially high relief and in real time.
In the very beginning of the virus crisis, the fear of the unknown and the comparatively broad coverage of the shutdown orders combined to overwhelm considerations of equal treatment. Food stores were open, yes, and churches were closed, but the emergency seemed to be understood to require drastic and rough measures, and people were prepared for a time to accept unequal treatment for, as it were, the common good.
But as the crisis reaches a second stage--an emergency of a different kind, now a more chronic or enduring condition--and as discretionary government decisions are made both as respects relaxing the closures and prosecuting violations of rules, the powerful psychological draw of equality as equal treatment starts to assert itself. Discretionary decisions require discrimination, and it's at this point that considerations of unfairness become stronger in people's psyche.
The trouble is that resentments about unequal treatment depend upon other, deeper judgments about the nature and value of various kinds of human activities. These judgments are signaled by the use of terms like "essential" but they aren't really resolved by them. Partisans of one or another sort of human activity or way of life then develop arguments for distinguishing the truly essential from the less essential, but these are invariably thought to be spurious or worse by partisans of another sort of human activity or way of life. The arguments about equality really are only cover for other sorts of arguments that it would not be possible to resolve without the rhetorical appeal to equality. The real disagreements go not only to different ways of life, but to different conceptions of the good or goods of any particular human activity. Consider religious observance. If one's view is that all of the true goods of religious observance can be obtained individually, at home, in solitary prayer in front of a screen, then one will think that distinguishing between churches and liquor stores--treating the goods of the human activities that these places foster unequally--is perfectly justified. But if one's view of the true goods of religious observance is very different, then one will not accept these arguments.
All of this to say something that has been said before, I suppose (see, e.g., Westen in part), but that seems especially striking to me right now. Both the psychological power of equality and its problematic, often unspoken, dependence on much deeper and more fundamental assumptions about the differential value of human activity, will become more acute as the crisis enters its subsequent and more attenuated phases.
