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A Note on National Review and Religion

Recent developments in the Republican presidential campaign have afforded the establishment right the opportunity to articulate its vision of order within the conservative movement, occasioning the curious spectacle of a movement which has played the people-against-the-elites card for generations suddenly lauding expertise, credentials, and the cultivated minority. There is, of course, a place for such things in any conservatism worthy of the name; the crucial things are that the elites and their substantive traditions be identified correctly, and that corrupt, false, and degraded pretenders to authority be exposed. One does not read Babbit, Weaver, or Kirk and develop a leveling sensibility; neither, though, does one acquire a sense that the characteristic modern forms of authority, being invested in value-neutral technique, are legitimate.

National Review, however, has recently telegraphed that, perhaps, that most venerable of traditional authorities is no longer quite so welcome as it once was.


Lots of people take it as a given that Mormonism is nuts; the tolerant ones just think this shouldn’t keep Mitt out of the White House. Many who hold the “Mormonism is nuts” position are religious themselves — and they’re the ones I find hardest to understand. I suspect that, almost to a man, they are (1) incapable of rationally defending their own beliefs and (2) completely unaware of how deeply irrational — in the sense of “rationality” given above — those beliefs are.

Jason Steorts is engaged in something broader than mere apologetics for the endorsement of Romney; his claims are more sweeping, and amount to a dogmatic assertion that the philosophical and political settlements of liberal modernity - according to which religious claims, and claims concerning matters unverifiable by means of the methodologies of modern empirical science, are, being fundamentally undecidable, indifferent to the question of right order, and must therefore be bracketed by participants in the naked public square of the liberal order - are incontestable:

We may not be able to persuade our robot that atoms exist, but we can call in quantum physicists to do the job, and their explanation will be clear and rational. Has anyone in the history of the world explained clearly and rationally how a virgin birth works?...
Let’s keep things simple and stick with god, lower-case. I invite any reader to e-mail me what he would say to convince the robot that there exists a god of any sort. Aspirants should consult the efforts of, among others, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant before improving on them. (“Improving”: There is a depressing philosophical consensus that those guys failed. You can disagree — but the robot will make you say why.)

In addition to being rationally untenable, and arriving at the convenient time of NR's endorsement of Romney, such sentiments reflect the growing alienation of much of establishment conservatism from its own heritage; the National Review of a generation ago would not have published such vacuous and sophomoric thoughts.

But it gets better. Not only are all religions more or less equally irrational - except for those that may be still less rational, as those inclined to read Steort's piece on Romney's Mormonism will discover - but Steorts would apparently have us believe that Christianity is no more warranted by reason than religious beliefs which entail the following


A female corpse was skinned, gutted, chopped into smithereens with an axe, and mixed with barley. At some point, two young monks showed up on a motorcycle, chanted a sutra, got bored, and headed back to the monastery. Meanwhile a swarm of central-Asian vultures circled overhead. Once the corpse was mutilated beyond recognition or form, everyone present retreated from it, allowing the vultures to dive, bomber-like, and devour the mass of human pulp within ten minutes. If you have never seen central-Asian vultures, it will be hard for you to imagine how sinister this sight was. They are much larger than their American cousins, roughly the size of golden eagles, and they hop about more evilly than any creation of an animator’s pen.
The man wielding the axe went about his business as casually as the vultures would. He even invited me to take pictures. (I declined.) He was a relative of the deceased, but not a close one. Generally, after a death, the local monk-astrologer determines which relatives are to attend the deceased’s funerary rites. Next of kin are, mercifully, exempted from this duty.
It is a grisly custom that even many Tibetans find hard to witness. But it is also mesmerizing. In particular, I will never forget the sound of the axe as it cleft bone and struck the rock on which the corpse lay. (This sound was something like that of chopping carrots, but wetter, and with a metallic ping at its core.)

Try as I might, I cannot now dissociate the two articles in my own thinking: religion is irrational, and Christianity may be more incredible than most; and if this is so, than Tibetan sky funerals are at least as worthy or unworthy as Christian rites. And recognition of this is now imperative because NR has endorsed Romney, a Mormon, though also, in light of the other developments I have mentioned, because religion, apparently, now must keep to its rightful place of silence even in the precincts of conservatism.

John O'Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, once enunciated O'Sullivan's law, which states that any institution not explicitly conservative will become liberal with the passage of time. To which I add the corollary: any Western institution or organization not explicitly Christian will become liberal with the passage of time.

Comments (11)

National Review and FrontPageMag seem to be battling over who can outdo the other in their enforcement of political correctness. Just read Ben Johnson’s new hit piece on Buchanan at FrontPage, or Frum's new hit piece on Huckabee.

Maximos,

BTW, I don't often comment here, but I stop by every few days to see what you've written. You write some of the most insightful blog entries I've come across. Keep up the good work.

I think I heard about the Steorts article. It was not well-received in the McGrew household, as you can imagine. Where do they _find_ these shallow kids? (Jonah Goldberg was such another a few years back.)

There is even more to it than what you have written. Although I would never subscribe to Buddhism, at least it is a religious system that has more than a 1000 years under its belt. Mormonism has 200 years under its belt, and we are supposed to act like its believers are owed some awesome respect for their beliefs. I can respect a guy who says we continue the customs of my people from time immemorial. I and a lot of other people aren't going to extend the same courtesy to a store front church or a fly by night religion. Heaven forbid we make such distinctions.

Good post. That sound you hear is National Review style conservatism bleeding out, having already slit its own throat.

"Convince a robot" isn't at all question-begging now, is it? Just how philosophically ignorant must one be in order to enter the ranks of the "brights"?

We may not be able to persuade our robot that atoms exist, but we can call in quantum physicists to do the job, and their explanation will be clear and rational.

That one made me laugh out loud. Just when you think the boundaries of hubristic ignorance have been stretched as far as they can possibly be stretched, some commentator innovates. How old is this guy? Does he even know what an eigenvalue or a Hilbert space or a Feynman diagram is?

That is a worthy distinction, and it is also worth mentioning that the repugnant 'sky funeral' appears to be specific to Tibetan Buddhism, for what it is worth. Though I only alluded to the point in my piece, there is the argument (look down in the comment thread) that Steorts was actually arguing for the greater rational credibility of Mormonism, relative to Christianity - which would be more than simply irrational and possibly cynical; it would be despicable.

I wish I knew where they found all of these shallow youths. Paleoconservatives have suggested for years, and not without some warrant, that there is an element of nepotism involved, though obviously this cannot be a complete explanation. I'd suggest that while that is occasionally a factor, the reality is that they are selected for their loyalty to the dominant ideological constructs of the movement, which are neoconservative (re: neoliberal or right-liberal) in provenance. Paleoconservatives, of course, have also made that argument, and given its plausibility - many of these callow youths are manifestly not selected on account of their erudition, eloquence, and profound philosophical conservatism - it is interesting to engage in a little textual deconstruction, in order to divine the mysterious inner workings of The Movement. It can be a bit like reading newspapers in the Soviet Union, and figuring that a transparently bogus report concerning an increase in wheat production really means that some former Kremlin heavy is about to be shipped - or already has been shipped - off to Vorkuta. And in the present case(s), though the readings need not be as abstruse as in the Soviet case, it is plain enough that the establishment wishes the social conservatives to keep to their assigned place - at the back of the bus.

"...any Western institution or organization not explicitly Christian will become liberal with the passage of time."

Many conservatives have tried to maintain the fiction that Christian civilization and the Enlightenment that usurped it were somehow of the same philosophical continuum. National Review has resolved this internal contradiction by throwing in with the Liberal Tradition.

Essentially, yes. National Review is signaling, bit by bit, that its sympathies are right-liberal, as opposed to conservative. You could call it a coming-out.

Steorts' rhetorical device of the "robot" is merely a stand-in for atheists in general and materialist atheists in particular. The robot, being a material thing, measuring all with a material meter-rod, is unable to accept any argument based outside of it's frame of reference. It is, in other words, a rigged game, the equivalent of proving a negative.

Hmm, lets try some other abstractions on the robot and see how useful the robot is for determining their existence. How about love? The robot cannot feel love, cannot detect it by any material means. He cannot measure it with his materialist measuring-stick. So it must just be a chemically-based delusion of humans.

How about existence? Can you prove to the robot that he actually exists? That's a problem that philosophy has been wrestling with for 4000 years. Based on a lack of evidence, the robot would have to reject the conclusion offered.

How about Good, Evil, Right, and Wrong? They are all value judgments offered without any real evidence to establish their validity. Why is murder wrong? People die all the time. Murder is a simple acceleration of the process. What, in essence makes it wrong. Your materialist robot has no argument he can accept that would allow that value judgment, only whether a particular murder was useful or not, profitable or foolish.

And in the end, that is where materialism always ends up, philosophically.

Frank:

From a personal standpoint, your post was most timely. The intellectual deterioration of National Review has been difficult for someone who was weaned on Kirk, Burnham and others in the 1970's. A younger generation of writers, unschooled in philosophical thinking has transformed Buckley's Burkean understanding of the role of culture into what is essentially a form of conservative utilitarianism.

As a consequence the primary objective of NR seems to be dictated by the desired political outcome of the editors. The Romney endorsement is not the issue from my perspective. Rather the countless articles and comments both on NRO and the magazine have attempted to justify the decision with bad arguments lacking in any principled reasoning.

When conservativism is untethered from Theism it will find refuge in materialism. Unfortunately, we have seen a similar move by the Tories in Britain.

In the meantime I have come to the sad conclusion that National Review is no longer a journal of thought. It's time to go back and read Burke, Kirk and the others who served as the inspiration for a once great magazine.

Regretfully,

Kevin

Frank:

From a personal standpoint, your post was most timely. The intellectual deterioration of National Review has been difficult for someone who was weaned on Kirk, Burnham and others in the 1970's. A younger generation of writers, unschooled in philosophical thinking has transformed Buckley's Burkean understanding of the role of culture into what is essentially a form of conservative utilitarianism.

As a consequence the primary objective of NR seems to be dictated by the desired political outcome of the editors. The Romney endorsement is not the issue from my perspective. Rather the countless articles and comments both on NRO and the magazine have attempted to justify the decision with bad arguments lacking in any principled reasoning.

When conservativism is untethered from Theism it will find refuge in materialism. Unfortunately, we have seen a similar move by the Tories in Britain.

In the meantime I have come to the sad conclusion that National Review is no longer a journal of thought. It's time to go back and read Burke, Kirk and the others who served as the inspiration for a once great magazine.

Regretfully,

Kevin

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