Counterintuitive though it may be, the past three decades have actually brought about the triumph of liberalism in the United States, liberalism of the big-government, policing-of-the-world, secular-values variety. The vision of Nelson Rockefeller, not Ronald Reagan, has attained supremacy within the GOP. Rockefeller and his Democratic counterpart, Hubert Humphrey, symbolized a bipartisan consensus in the 1960s and 1970s for monopoly capitalism tempered by a welfare state at home and a well-armed empire abroad. In the 2000s, the George W. Bush administration solidified a coalition between pragmatic heirs of Rockefeller such as Dick Cheney and neoconservative successors of Humphrey such as Paul Wolfowitz. Rhetorical crumbs notwithstanding, traditional conservatives and libertarians lack a seat at the table. Their support is desired—and needed—by party leaders, but they are excluded from power.

The standard of ideological measurement within the GOP has changed dramatically during the past half-century. By the criteria of the 1960s, the national leaders of the Republican Party today are all liberals. A generation of wolves (liberals) did not give birth to a generation of sheep (conservatives). Instead, partly out of personal convenience and partly for historical reasons, the Republican establishment donned fleece in the 1980s. Liberals in conservative clothing. Kabaservice doesn’t recognize a friend when he sees one. He continues to mourn the loss of moderates and progressives in the party, though they continue to thrive under a different guise.

If this is a Christian W-W, I’m in.

What Mad Men does have is atmosphere. And for us baby-boomers who were too young and too fundamentalist to know about the world of advertising and New York City life in the fast lane, Mad Men evokes an era and a world that is heavy on eye-candy. It allows us to see the world our parents did everything to prevent us from seeing.

But you can’t get by only on atmosphere, which is why the Coen Brothers are gems in the world of not-so-Indie cinema. They do atmosphere incredibly well. Just see Miller’s Crossing (their homage to the gangster genre) or Barton Fink (their homage to post-modernism). But in addition to atmosphere, the Coens add humor, irony (several helpings), and the Montaignian twist of things not being what they seem.

This is a long winded way of recommending a recent post by Noah Millman, a guy trained in economics who used to blog at the American Scene and now does so regularly for the American Conservative. Millman is the first to write (at least the first I’ve read) about the opening scene in A Serious Man and make sense of it, a movie that, by the way, captures the mood of an era and I suspect does well with Jewish-American life in the land of Lake Wobegone. Millman also supplies a reading of the movie based on Job which makes complete sense and completely missed me — perhaps because my biblical w-w is defective or because I spent too much time in the movie trying to figure out the opening scene. Here’s part of Millman writes about the Coens’ modern-day Job (he compares it to Tree of Life):

“The Tree of Life” is a snapshot of the moment when Job hears the voice out of the whirlwind. Jack has “kept it together” for years, decades, but for whatever reason today the defenses have broken down, and he is face to face with questions he has buried since he was a young man. (As the festival musaf liturgy says: “in the face of our sins were we exiled from our land,” which I take to mean: now, conscious of our exile, unable to make expiation through the Temple, we cannot escape a confrontation with our sins.) And he – we – see God’s answer: look at the dinosaurs! I made them, they lived, and thrived, and then I took them all away, and you never even knew them. And somehow Jack sees: yes, You will take them all, You will take us all, to where I do not know, but if I remember that, perhaps I can accept that taking my brother was just . . . taking back what was Yours. And I can make that a gift to you.

“A Serious Man” stops just before this point. The whirlwind comes – and the movie stops. This seems like an ending that endorses Larry’s moral confusion – even the whirlwind doesn’t mean anything – but, notwithstanding the Coen brothers’ evident lack of interest in piety, I question that. The filmmakers’ anger at Larry, at the smallness both of his seriousness and of his sins, and, by extension, at the entire middle-class insular Jewish culture in which they were reared, burns forth from the screen. The whirlwind doesn’t speak – the idea that the “wonders of creation” constitute some kind of answer to Larry (or Job) is simply mocked. But they did not make this movie arbitrarily. They made it for a reason. This perspective, this anger, is itself a version of God’s answer out of the whirlwind, and a meaningful one, as surely as Malick’s film is, and the Coen brothers, in abusing poor Larry so mercilessly, are playing the part of God in the story. They want to shake him out of who he is, into something, well, more like what they are, what Larry’s son, presumably, grew up to be.

I may disagree with Millman about the Coens’ “anger” or attempt to play God — I am not sure they are all that firm in their convictions. But it is the best reading of the film I’ve seen and invites another viewing — which will further predispose me with the Season Five version of Don Draper.

A Gentile (as in Russell P. Gentile) is the most recent, perhaps most earnest, certainly the boldest claimant, on the government and religion news front in the winter just past. While others have protested along the line of “separation of church and state” when government is interpreted as having crossed that line, Gentile goes further. The Florida businessman pleaded that he should not be punished (as he will be punished) for not having paid owed taxes which he argues that he does not owe. While the public is familiar with Catholic bishops being critical on the issue of having to pay taxes, even indirectly, or even “indirectly indirectly” when a government policy apparently conflicts with conscientious and doctrinal issues, Gentile will not pay taxes for anything. We are familiar with Baptists and others who hold the line on “separation,” Gentile poses a transcendent issue.

In short, he says he is not subject to human laws but is an American national who “resided in the Kingdom of Heaven.” He has been “as polite and patient” as he could be, but threatens to sue if the Feds come after him. (Thy have come.) He would not report his income, and faces substantial federal prison time and fines. He broke numbers of laws and set out to obstruct justice. The legal cases continue, and outcomes are uncertain as we write. Why waste readers’ time on a case that can be described as comical and trivial?

Two recent confirmations of this come from Mikelmann’s post on Rick Santorum’s appeal to evangelicals. He notes that Santorum, some kind of conservative Roman Catholic, has had more appeal to Protestants than those in his own communion. (Lyman Beecher and Josiah Strong are rolling in their graves.)

So, whereas John F. Kennedy seemed to put to rest the idea that a Catholic President would be subservient to the Pope, Santorum has made it an issue all over again. So he must be the choice of Catholics, right? Not according to the New York Times:

Many Catholics take issue with Mr. Santorum’s approach to their faith. Mr. Santorum, polls show, has lost the Catholic vote in every primary contest so far, some by wide margins.

Putting this all together, the Catholics don’t support a Catholic who won’t separate his church from the state, but the Politico-Evangelicals do. And that, my friends, is one more reason why politics is such a great spectator sport.

The second comes from an interview with Carl Trueman and Derek Thomas in which they were asked about the challenges of living in the United States as British citizens. Trueman replied in a way that should embarrass American Christians:

The challenge is often knowing who are the genuine Christians and who are the mere cultural ones. It is not so much the case in Philadelphia but in many parts of the South, church is still the place to go to be seen and to set up business deals after the service.

My wife recently remarked to me that, in the UK, we rarely knew how friends at church voted. Politics simply was not part of the conversation and nobody presumed to assume that you voted one way or the other. There is still a certain overlap here between politics and theology, some aggressive manifestations of which can make life uncomfortable for a foreigner. The ‘culture war’ aspect of the church is one of the strangest aspects of the church here from a foreigner’s perspective.

Again, none of this means that evangelicals should retreat from the public square, though it does suggest entering the public square as citizens rather than as believers would be a help. But it does mean that until we clear up confusions like evangelicals supporting Roman Catholic candidates on Christian grounds and non-American evangelicals feeling estranged from evangelicalism’s politicized atmosphere, the folks who insist on the value of religion for public life have some work to do.

POLITICS/ETHICS
• God’s principles for governing society are found, not in Scripture, but in natural law.
• Natural law is to be determined, not by Scripture, but by human reason and conscience.
• Only those who accept these principles can consistently believe in justification by faith alone.
• The Christian has no biblical mandate to seek changes in the social, cultural, or political order.
• To speak of a biblical worldview, or biblical principles for living, is to misuse the Bible.
• Scripture teaches about Christ, his atonement, and our redemption from sin, but not about how to apply that salvation to our current problems.

Just for starters, using the verb, GOVERN, with culture is a bit odd since culture develops in ways that hardly reflect human application of either general or special revelation to it. Think once again of language. Is anyone actually responsible for channeling definitions and grammatical constructions? Maybe the editors of dictionaries. But are they the ones responsible for the differences between Shakespeare’s usage and Updike’s? (Do the cultural transformers ever really think about what they are proposing? BTW, language is pretty basic to anything we meaningfully describe as culture. BTW squared, the Bible not only refuses to give a definition of revival. It also avoids a definition of culture. In which case, anyone trying to base his definition of culture on Scripture is simply offering his opinion of what the Bible teaches.)

Frame’s objections to these points, even if he garbles them, have a lot to do with his conviction that the Bible is a surer foundation for ethical reflection than general revelation. He writes:

. . . arguments actually developed from natural revelation premises . . . are rarely cogent. Roman Catholics, for example, often argue that birth control is forbidden, because of the natural connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction. That connection obviously exists [my comment - if it's obvious, then isn't there some cogency mo jo going on?], but the moral conclusion is not a necessary one. Indeed the argument is a naturalistic fallacy, an attempt to reason from fact to obligation, from “is” to “ought.”

Notice that Frame refuses to notice how the Bible has prevented Presbyterians like himself from rejecting the regulative principle of worship. The Bible of the Puritans is not cogent for Frame. And his observation that natural law argumentation fails a test of logic does not prove that the Bible is sufficient to GOVERN culture.

He continues:

Cogent and persuasive ethical reasoning presupposes a w-w and standards of judgment. [Edited for sensitive Old Life eyes.] It is not easy to argue these from nature alone. For Christians, these standards come from Scripture. So apart from Scripture ethical argument loses its cogency and often its persuasiveness. Nonbelievers, of course, won’t usually accept Scripture as authoritative. But they may at least respect an argument that is self-conscious about its epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions.

I doubt it. Actually, I know such respect won’t be forthcoming since heaps of ridicule have been directed at evangelicals for the last thirty years for trying such w-wish arguments. Maybe Frame thinks a graduate seminar in philosophy is the context for these disputes. If so, he forgets the verb GOVERN. And when unbelievers confront people who want the GOVERNORS to implement religious teaching in politics and cultural standards, they get a little testy.

But Frame recently received support for his argument about the insufficiency of general revelation from Peter Leithart in a column about Rick Santorum (who seems to be the darling these days of more Roman Catholics and evangelicals than Romney has accounts in Swiss banks). Leithart comments specifically on the ridicule that the Roman Catholic Santorum has received for criticizing Obama’s “phony theology.” Leithart admits that he is suspicious of politicians when they talk this way. But he also finds such speech “invigorating.” The reason is that natural revelation, as Frame also says, is insufficient.

For many conservatives, natural law provides the secular grammar we need for debating moral issues in a pluralistic society. . . . I don’t think so. Natural law theory remains too entangled with the particularities of theology to do everything natural lawyers want it to do. That is the thrust of Nicholas Bamforth and David A.J. Richards’ Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (2007). Bamforth and Richards argue that “the new natural lawyers’ arguments about sexuality, gender, and the law are religious.” Natural law theorists “meld” secular and religious motivations and norms and are “unlikely . . . to be able to draw a clean distinction between that which is knowable through revelation and that which is graspable by reason alone.” . . .

On the plus side, the fact that natural lawyers don’t actually put revelation and the gospel to the side is much to their credit. In practice, they resist the pressure to erect a wall between their faith and their public philosophy. On the down side, this “melding” of secular and religious arguments undermines their claim that natural law provides a theologically neutral grammar for a pluralistic society.

Natural law theory has many uses. Using its categories, we explore the contours of creation to uncover the pathways the Creator has laid out for us. Natural law reasoning can demonstrate the “fit” between creation and revelation. The fact that women, not men, bear babies is ethically significant, as is the fact that human beings talk but animals don’t. Natural law is rhetorically useful for advancing arguments and purposes that would be rejected out of hand if stated in overtly religious terms.

But despite all that value, natural law comes up short:

The fundamental Christian political claim is “Jesus is Lord,” a truth that lies beyond natural reason. Christians can’t finally talk about politics without talking about Jesus, and, yes, Satan and the Bible too. We can’t talk politics without sounding like Rick Santorum, and we shouldn’t try to.

This is a very strange conclusion if not for the place of publication, First Things. A Protestant talking about Jesus as Lord would never have endorsed the religious views of a Roman Catholic in submission to a bishop whom Protestants have believed to be in competition with Jesus for the rule over his church. So if we are going to bring the Bible into the public square, poof! there goes Santorum discourse as a model for Protestants.

But, let’s go back to GOVERNANCE and what book of revelation is sufficient for rulers in society. Frame and Leithart claim to take the high ground of explicit Christian affirmation and implicitly (or not so implicitly) criticize advocates of natural law for failures of courage, for not speaking frankly and openly about explicitly Christian convictions. Again, the problem they identify is one of argument. They spot a weakness and conclude that theirs must be better, though I am still waiting for a solid exegetical case that is not theonomic and that does justice to the cultural program of Jesus and the apostles for transformation and establishing Christ’s Lordship. No fair appealing to the Arian sympathizer, Constantine.

But Frame and Leithart are not actually dealing with the real world of a society that admits believers from all faiths as well as unbelievers to citizenship and allows them to run for public office. BTW, that same society includes no provisions about making special revelation the basis for how believers or non-believers will GOVERN the culture. In fact, this society excludes special revelation as the basis for national life. Maybe that’s a bad thing. But that’s where we are in the greatest nation on God’s green earth.

So how sufficient is the Bible to govern a society composed of diverse religious adherents and non-believers? We already know that the Bible has not been sufficient to yield a unified church. Now it’s supposed to give us a platform for cultural and political cogency and coherence in a diverse and religiously free society?

The objections to Frame and Leithart are not simply empirical or based on United States law. They are also theological. Appealing to the Bible as a norm for non-believers places those who don’t believe in an odd situation, at least according to theology that stresses the anti-thesis. How are those hostile to God going to submit to GOVERNMENT based on the Bible? I have asked this many times and I’m still lacking a decent answer, one that actually does justice to the Bible’s prohibitions against idolatry and the United States’ legal toleration of what some of its citizens consider idolatry. Another question is this: doesn’t a proposal for the Bible’s sufficiency as a rule for culture and society mean ultimately that only believers will GOVERN? After all, if fallen human beings cannot understand the Bible aright without the illumination of the Spirit, then only the regenerate may GOVERN because they alone have the discernment to apply Scripture to society and culture.

But maybe Frame and Leithart don’t want to go that far. Maybe they believe that people can appeal to the ethical parts of the Bible without needing to be regenerate. And then they walk over the cliff of liberalism and deny that the Bible is first and foremost not a book of ethics but of redemption. That was the basis for Machen’s opposition to reading the Bible and saying prayers in public schools. The great-grandaddy of children militia wrote:

The reading of selected passages from the Bible, in which Jews and Catholics and Protestants and others can presumably agree, should not be encouraged, and still less should be required by law. The real center of the Bible is redemption; and to create the impression that other things in the Bible contain any hope for humanity apart from that is to contradict the Bible at its root. . . .

If the mere reading of Scripture could lead to such a conclusion, imagine appealing to the Bible for running a society that includes believers and non-believers.

The lesson is that 2k (aka SCET) is really more faithful to Reformed teachings (which are biblical) than are 2k critics’ constant charges of infidelity and deficiency. Those who think the Bible sufficient to GOVERN culture or society must either form a political body comprised only of church members or they must cut and paste biblical teachings to make it fit a religiously mixed society. Either way (Massachusetts Bay or liberal Protestantism), we’ve been there and done that. Time for 2k’s critics to come up with their own proposals for GOVERNING and transforming culture that are not blinded to their own insufficiencies.

But the appeal to w— v— has its limits and this video suggests what they are. It is of course biased toward Ron Paul and mocks Santorum. But it does remind me of how invoking w— v— often reassures and inspires instead of supplying answers to a society’s difficult questions. The key phrase is, “I like my w— v— a lot. It makes me happy” and can be found around the 3:15 mark in this video.

I believe that Washington, an Episcopalian, was a serious but moderate Christian, but there are reasons to wonder. Whether from personal scruples concerning his worthiness, or some other concern, he never took communion. And he displayed a remarkable aversion to using the name of Jesus in his voluminous correspondence. As Edward G. Lengel’s delightful Inventing George Washington has shown, 19th-century biographers eagerly recalled shadowy memories of Washington being discovered praying privately, to the extent that you’d think the man did little else besides kneeling in the woods. He almost certainly did pray privately, but as a proper Virginia gentleman, he did not wear his faith on his sleeve.

There are graver doubts about Lincoln’s faith, especially early in his life. He developed a reputation as a skeptic as a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, and Mary Todd Lincoln concluded that he was not a “technical Christian.” He struggled to put his faith in Christ even as the events of later years took the edge off his religious infidelity. Lincoln grew up in a strongly Calvinist Baptist family, and though he did not embrace all his parents’ beliefs, he became ever-more convinced of the Calvinist doctrine of God’s sovereign rule over human affairs. Richard Carwardine, one of Lincoln’s finest biographers, says that Lincoln presented “his deterministic faith in a religious language that invoked an all-controlling God.”

But despite the weaknesses and errors in Washington and Lincoln’s devotion, Kidd tells us not to worry (maybe even adding a pinch of “be happy”).

Evangelical history buffs spend a lot of time speculating about the personal faith of great historical figures such as Washington and Lincoln. This is an important topic, but there’s a sense in which, for historical purposes, it doesn’t really matter if these presidents were serious Christians. When you broaden the scope of the question, it is easy to demonstrate that religion was very important to both of them. Both endorsed a public role for religion in America, and Lincoln particularly employed religious rhetoric, and the words of the Bible itself, to the greatest effect of any political leader in American history. For Lincoln and Washington, a secularized public square was inconceivable.

So even if we won’t trust these presidents’ profession of faith, we should trust them on the importance of religion to public life. In fact, Kidd even believes that the presidents’ pro-religious views accounts for their political accomplishments.

So yes, I would love to know exactly what Washington and Lincoln believed personally about Jesus. But there’s no question that, in a public sense, faith mattered to them a great deal, and featured centrally in their concept of a thriving American nation. Their reverence for faith’s vital role in the republic helps account for Washington and Lincoln’s greatness.

This is another case where 2k would allow for sound historical and political judgment without having to contort the gospel in the process. After all, if Lincoln and Washington succeeded simply by being pro-faith, what reason would they have for trusting in Christ truly? Kidd does not consider that these presidents might have been less successful because an explicit embrace of Christianity and establishing policies in accord with such support would have violated the Constitution and alienated some voters (especially Roman Catholics who were not so willing to separate morality from theology). For a coalition dedicated to the gospel, it is an odd admission to suggest at TGC’s website that any religious affirmation less than the gospel will do. Not to mention that the kind of utilitarian and generic faith that Washington and Lincoln promoted makes it harder for the gospel to get a hearing since, again, things go as well with a generic Christian God and his morality as they do with an orthodox Christ and the good works that follow from faith.

At the same time, 2k would allow Kidd and his TGC editors to give as many thumbs as they have up to the first and sixteenth presidents — that is, of course, if you agree with the Federalists and Republicans. Since Washington and Lincoln were officers of the United States, the criteria for evaluating their presidencies should not be religious or quasi-religious but political. 2k allows a Christian to esteem Washington and Lincoln without having to run them through the grid of where they come down on the gospel, the deity of Christ, or how many times they invoke, in Washington’s less than orthodox phrasing, “the benign Parent of the human race.”

Religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal members of a constitutional democracy must accept the translation proviso as the price to be paid for the neutrality of the state authority toward competing worldviews. For secular citizens, the same ethics of citizenship entails a complementary burden. By the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens, including religious ones, they are obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion and will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular and religious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level.

Leithart doesn’t believe the burden is equal and grabs support from Peter Gordon:

Does it even make sense to say they are both burdens? Consider the analogy of translation between profane languages: If a Frenchman is asked to express his claims in public where English is the only language in principle intelligible to all participants, then of course the Frenchman can be required to obey the rules of English grammar. That is surely a burden, and it may be a great challenge for someone who has spent his entire life thinking in French. But it makes no sense to say that the Englishman bears a symmetrical burden because he cannot think of himself as a “judge” concerning the comprehensive merits of France. There is nothing about speaking English that makes such a judgment plausible, let alone necessary. Habermas, I suspect, is trying to dress up the unidirectionality of the burdens of translation in a way that promotes a more favorable vision of reciprocity. This may be diplomatic—and, given the frequent intolerance of both parties, religious and secularist, some diplomacy may be called for—but the notion of a shared burden in translation does not accurately capture Habermas’s deeper commitments to profane reason.

According to Leithart, who continues to invoke Gordon, Habermas’ notion of translation is weak and invalid because the very idea of translating religion into the secular public sphere is — I guess — unequal. Gordon writes: “Translation, after all, is a linguistic event of semantic transfer, from a language of origin to a target language—from religion to the secular public sphere. The analogy thus reveals how Habermas’s earliest ideas concerning the character of public reason have not lost their validity.”

I am not interested exactly in Habermas’ or Gordon’s points, but I am intrigued that Leithart finds the idea of translation to be revealing of the difficulties that believers confront in secular societies. Is it the case that Christians do speak a different language of government, or law, or public policy from non-Christians? Do Christians even have their own language? This is particularly important since the Reformation sought to put the Bible, the liturgy, and theology into the vernacular. That included indirectly Luther’s translations of the Bible setting the agenda for modern German and Calvin’s French functioning as an important stage in the development of modern French (so I’ve read; I don’t presume to be a historian of language).

In other words, language is a common human activity. When the Holy Spirit regenerates Christians they don’t and shouldn’t speak in new languages (at least cessationist ones don’t). When Christians talk about politics, nations, and laws, they use the same words, syntax, and punctuation as other citizens. They may use words like morality, justice, king, Lord, or law. But non-Christians don’t have any trouble understanding what those words mean. They may disagree about the virtue of a monarchy, since they live in a republic (or an empire that in its “aw shucks” moments pretends to be a republic). But the words that Christians use, even the words to describe Christ as king of kings, or the magistrate’s duty to enforce the entire Decalogue are not foreign to non-Christians. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean you are speaking a foreign tongue. To think that a difference of opinion is really a problem of translation is bizarre.

But it does indicate the lengths to which the application of the antithesis between believers and non-believers may run. In the haste to assert that Christianity goes all the way down and claim a victim status for believers who live under oppressive secular governments, Federal Visionaries, transformationalists, and neo-Calvinists make the world safe for thinking that Christians are so different that they speak in ways that other people can’t understand. In other words, they pave the way for those Christians who really do think they have a Christian language — Pentecostals.

I draw attention to two particular posts. In the first, MM comments on the danger of divided political loyalties (as if the Republican candidates differ all that much) dividing the church:

After the election there will likely be groaning about how the evangelical vote broke up. But mourn not; it’s not always a bad thing to break up. Think of it as an opportunity. Think of it as an opportunity to see that there is no one way for a Christian to vote. Think of it as an opportunity to realize that looking at candidates from an alleged biblical worldview does not inexorably lead to one candidate or another. Maybe selecting political leaders isn’t the same as selecting church leaders. And for those who, like Michele Bachmann, want more political speech in the church maybe it’s a good demonstration of how folks get politically divided and a reminder that we shouldn’t bring that division into the church. Because breaking up a church over politics would be a bad thing.

In the second, MM observes the inadequacies of w—- v—-ism for finding the right candidate:

People who call themselves Evangelicals tend to have a bit of a bandwagon mentality – in part because of their self-perception of belonging under the Evangelical tent – and they may have hopped on board the Worldview Express with the general idea of living Christianly when, really, the worldview commitment is more specific and theologically loaded than that. . . .

The fault isn’t with the voters; it’s with worldview. What does worldview say about federal enforcement vs. state enforcement of marriage and abortion? What does it say about immigration? Does it tell us whether Iran should have nuclear weapons? Subsidies for ethanol? Tax reform? The answers are “nothing” and “no.”

Meanwhile, evangelical parachurch leaders are busily engaged in discussions to find a candidate who is not a Mormon. The last I checked, the U.S. Constitution forbade any religious tests for holding public office. Granted, the Constitution also grants citizens the freedom to use religious tests to oppose candidates. But the flip side of that freedom is the embarrassment to which Christian Americans are entitled when they observe such folly. If you don’t care for Romney’s policies or even his persona, fine. Don’t support him. But don’t use religion as an excuse to oppose the Mormon and then find reasons to support the divorced Roman Catholic. (Such hypocrisy is moving me to support Romney and even to feel a Chris Matthews tingle in my leg at the thought of the nation’s first Protestant president.)

Bloom and I were once employed by the same academic department. I hasten to add, lest there be a question of bias, that my decade at Yale left me feeling little toward him one way or the other. I never even met the man. Having fulfilled the dream of academics everywhere by renouncing as many obligations toward his home department as practicably possible—meetings, committee assignments, duties in the graduate program, every responsibility except undergraduate teaching—Bloom had long since become, as he likes to put it, “a department of one.” I think I only saw him about three times.

Which is not to say he wasn’t sometimes on my mind. At a certain point during my sojourn at the institution, I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz. (Marlow, broken by his African ordeal, was any number of my senior colleagues, their souls crushed by the tenure process. The “pilgrims”—that pack of hopeful fools who set off into the jungle in pursuit of a chimerical fortune—were the graduate students.)

Since I have of late been defending celebrity academics (or their athletic coaches) from easy put downs, let me explain that the appeal of this depiction is what it says about American higher education. If folks believe that Division One athletics is a problem, they may also want to consider a system that employs professors not to assume normal faculty responsibilities.

But the point of this post is to call attention to the wonderful description of the moral perplexities that confronted the United Kingdom at the time of the Civil War in the United States. The following from a review of Amanda Foreman’s book, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random House, 2011), proves to this 2k equivocator that people in power seldom have an easy time determining the “right” thing to do:

FREEDOM is a rangy, broad-shouldered value, capable of heavy rhetorical lifting. Liberals had coalesced around another form of freedom: free trade, the bedrock of British industrialization. Abolitionism had taken root in the partly protectionist, largely rural soil of late eighteenth-century Britain. Now panting, shrieking trains ripped through a land studded by smokestacks and mines; conurbations crawled over hillsides like great black snakes. Touring the factory towns spawned by late industrialization, Friedrich Engels described the socially deadening grind of workers who toiled interminable shifts at the steam-powered looms, trudged home to fetid slums, supped on potato parings, and nursed their babies on gin.

Engels likened factory labor to enslavement, but Lancashire textile workers in fact owed their livelihood to American slaves. Rhymed Punch:

Though with the North we sympathize,

It must not be forgotten,

That with the South we’ve stronger ties,

Which are composed of cotton.

Textiles were Britain’s biggest business, and cotton from the deep South was its biggest source. The Union blockade of Southern ports snipped the supply line to millions of Britons reliant on the industry. The resulting “cotton famine” hit hard and fast: within a year, 400,000 British workers were unemployed or nearly so, putting their 1.5 million dependents at risk. State welfare cases quadrupled in months. Even the staunchest abolitionists, Prime Minister Palmerston included, had to see the crisis in Lancashire as a more pressing humanitarian problem for the government than the plight of far-off slaves. Recognizing the Confederacy, or at least evading the blockade, could restore the cotton supply, while joining the Union might deepen and prolong the suffering at home.

Then there was the political freedom that Liberals championed abroad: the freedom of people to govern themselves. Palmerston—whose “attitudes,” Foreman nicely observes, “had been formed in the age when wigs and rouge were worn by men as well as women”—had made his reputation as a defender of national self-determination, in Belgium, Greece, Italy, and Hungary. (Never mind that he also sent in gunboats to assert British power in the Middle East and China.) Why not the Confederate States of America? “The South fight for independence; what do the North fight for except to gratify passion or pride?” asked the home secretary. The rising Liberal star William Ewart Gladstone fancied he saw shades of Garibaldi in Jefferson Davis. “We may have our own opinions about slavery,” Gladstone declared the day after the Emancipation Proclamation ran in the Times, “we may be for or against the South, but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders … have made a nation.” (Gladstone, later revered as the “People’s William,” had delivered his maiden speech defending his plantation-owning father’s treatment of slaves.) Give the Confederacy political freedom, these men assumed, and freedom from slavery would follow.