By Ryan Hammill
Monday, July 11, 2016
During my sophomore year I argued with a friend in my
dorm room about charter schools and private school vouchers. My private college
had just hosted a prominent, left-wing educational activist, and after hearing
him I set out to assail the evil, reactionary supporters of school choice. Yet
for all my stated concern for the poor, why did I consider it such a threat for
low-income families to have a choice about their children’s education?
Back in our posh suburbs, my parents had the means to
enroll me in private school, but nevertheless chose to send me to local public
schools—after all, they outperformed many local private schools. Meanwhile, my
friend, a refugee from Eastern Europe (newly a U.S. citizen!) who suffered
through mediocre public schools in Seattle, was too kind to rub my hypocrisy in
my face.
This episode, which occurred back when I happily
straddled that collegiate mish-mash of progressivism and radicalism—commonly
expressed today in enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders—illustrates exactly what drove
me away from leftist politics: Much of what the Left proposes to aid poor and
marginalized people ends up hurting them.
At the time, however, the discourse fit the dorm room.
That year, my roommates and I had unwittingly selected the room right next to
Barack Obama’s old one. My leftist positions also fit Occidental College at
large, where every school year brings a new protest movement as predictably as
our picturesque Los Angeles campus brings film crews. Not only is our protest
culture annually consistent; we also raise political correctness to astounding
heights of inventiveness.
For example: while the name of the Arthur G. Coons
administration building was not, in the end, actually changed, protests against
the former college president’s last name resulted in the policy that college
employees, including student tour guides, should refer to the administration
building only by its initials. So I remain confused that protestors have yet to
call for Occidental to change its own name, given its inherent, stigmatizing
implication of the Oriental. I guess the undergraduates need to give Edward
Said a closer read.
Indoctrination In
Identity and Ideology
We at Occidental—or “Oxy,” as anyone who knows it calls
it—are proud of having educated the 44th president of the United States. The
shrine in the library is proof of this. That he left for the chillier climes of
New York for the second half of his undergraduate career usually remains
unspoken, although we do claim having hosted Obama’s political debut: a speech
condemning South African apartheid, including a planned interruption by white
“thugs” who hauled Obama off the stage in a bit of political theater.
Racial division has since become more complicated—there’s
no longer a regime (in South Africa or America’s South) that explicitly affirms
race-based discrimination. The sources of racial inequality are now more
shadowy than Jim Crow’s intentionally discriminatory laws, and racism’s
consequences more difficult to assess.
When I arrived at Oxy, I had accepted my overriding guilt
from the “system,” but had not yet learned the intricacies of identity
politics. Eventually, I learned I could be an “ally” in “the struggle”
(although “accomplice” is now the term du
jour). I especially learned that as a white, straight, cis-gendered
Christian man I could never really understand the depth of the system’s
oppressive nature, given my position of privilege.
More importantly, I learned the true task of the
intellectual, although more from example than instruction. Our task as history
majors—and in the humanities generally—consisted largely of pulling the veil of
ideology off of a text, and exposing how that ideological veil disguised a
text’s true intent to oppress, or conversely, to resist oppression (this method
also applies to individuals, social movements, and more).
These two insights—oppressed people’s unique
epistemological access into the nature of oppression along with defining the
academic task as uncovering narratives of oppression and resistance—fused to
impart a usually unspoken but often-felt authority to non-white, non-straight,
non-male students to pronounce ultimately upon a text’s level of oppression.
Numerous times a gay Latino student, say, would share his thoughts, and any
student who had previously said something to the contrary would then
reinterpret his argument to agree.
I more or less accepted all of this, although I tried to
build a wall around my Christian faith to protect it from the winnowing fork of
ideological criticism. Like maleness and whiteness, Christianity was
definitively classed as an oppressive metanarrative, so I was never completely
at ease. I had some limited evangelistic success in showing how Christianity
could be a force of resistance to the system’s oppression, but in so doing, I
inevitably accepted the other assumptions of identity politics and ideological
criticism. Now I see this ontology and epistemology are incompatible with my
faith.
Treating
Minorities As Second-Class Academics
The first real cracks in my leftist commitment didn’t
appear until a modern U.S. history course. Each student was required to discuss
the reading before class in an online forum. As we read about Jane Addams and
Jacob Riis, among others, a curious pattern emerged. Two students, one Latino
and one black, seemed stuck. In every round of online class debate, they
basically said the same thing: because Addams stripped immigrants of their
ethnic identity, she was an assimilationist and therefore a white supremacist.
Because Riis focused only on ethnic whites, he silenced the experience of
people of color and was therefore a white supremacist.
The thing is, our readings almost always addressed those issues—they
pointed out that the subjects of our study missed certain things and excluded
certain people. In other words, they had limits. Despite this, these two
students of color seemed deaf to the ideological critique already present in
the essays we were discussing. They just reiterated it, but online, with all
caps and exclamation marks. Meanwhile, the other students in the class
acknowledged these critiques, and were interested in discussing the broader
arguments of the essays. These other two students occasionally engaged, but
usually only to press their points. They didn’t discuss so much as give virtual
speeches.
Identity politics, I began to realize, while advertised
as a tool of empowerment for oppressed people, hamstrings its supposed
beneficiaries. Identity politics circumscribes their academic role into
classroom activists who denounce oppressive ideology. To wade into interpretive
subtleties would betray their ethnic or sexual communities.
But that leaves the game to students like me: “the oppressors.”
An ideology designed to mitigate the privilege of white males ended up placing
those students right back at the head of the table. Under the identity politics
regime, minority students’ speeches won’t change in substance, thus there’s no
reason to expect them to closely read a text. All they are expected to do is
find the plausible oppression in the text to which their identity offers them
special epistemological access.
Meanwhile, a white male like myself is expected to puzzle
out the implications of a text from multiple perspectives, since we don’t have
any handholds of oppressed identity we can use for our analysis. Thus, white
males are held to a higher standard of scholarship, while other students are
offered this easier, personal avenue of critique, an avenue that, for all its
clarity, is hard to resist. These students, by not being held to the same
standard, are treated as second-class academics.
Dorothy Day
Betrayed
This particular U.S. history course not only revealed the
bait-and-switch that identity politics visited on students from historically
oppressed communities, but it also pulled back the curtain on what I’ll call my
“Christian accommodationism.” In college I had been making an effort to show
how Jesus’ denunciations of Herod and the temple elite and Paul’s affirmation
of Jesus as Lord instead of Caesar made Christians allies—sorry, accomplices—to
leftist radicals. But a chance conversation I accidentally overheard after
class changed that.
We had been discussing Michael Harrington and his 1962
book “The Other America,” that era’s deeply influential documentation of
poverty in the United States. Born into a Catholic family and educated by
Jesuits, Harrington eventually became an atheist and socialist, but not before
joining the Catholic Worker movement. Due to my own experience living with
Catholic Workers in California, I did then and continue to hold deep admiration
for Dorothy Day and her movement.
The professor’s explanation of the Catholic Workers’
voluntary poverty, however, mystified my classmates. After class, one student
walked out of the building with our professor. By chance, I was walking right
behind them.
“I don’t get this voluntary poverty thing,” the student
said.
“It’s pretty strange,” the professor replied.
“It’s like you’re playing at being poor.”
“Yeah, it’s really patronizing.”
A banal, inconsequential exchange. They have almost
certainly forgotten it. But for me, that conversation was like a meteor that
knocked me out of my usual orbit. If Day, a former Communist and lifelong
pacifist who spent her adult life living alongside the poor and protesting war,
cannot satisfy the critics on the Left, what Christian can? If her example of
self-emptying discipleship is not politically correct enough, whose is?
I realized the answer is “no one.” The scales fell from
my eyes.
“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is,”
C.S. Lewis wrote. “Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has
landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a
great campaign of sabotage.”
All along, I’d been earnestly trying to convince the
enemy combatants we were on their side. Really, I needed to be convincing them
to come join our side. To be sure, this single conversation hadn’t been the
whole ballgame, so to speak. My sense that, no matter how much Christianity
sidled up to left-wing politics it would remain a bastard stepchild in the eyes
of other leftists, had probably been building up for a while. But that
conversation was the moment I finally allowed myself to see what I had blinked
at before. I couldn’t call myself a leftist anymore.
All the Old Things
My realization that identity politics actually hurt the
oppressed, along with my disillusionment that Christianity could really
maintain an easy alliance with leftist politics, did not automatically make me
a conservative. In fact, it made me feel alienated: Why was I in college? What
did Christianity have to do with the liberal arts? Am I wasting my time here?
Luckily, there was still a heretic at Oxy, and I found him in my senior year.
“What’s going on in this painting?” the professor asked
in our first class, showing us Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” A female
student raised her hand. She answered that the figure on the right, holding the
red robe, was trying to cover up Venus’ body and repress her femininity.
I sighed. Here we
go again, I thought to myself. I’d already spent three years locating sites
of oppression and denouncing colonialist narratives. Did I have to do it all
over again, this time with Renaissance art?
“I actually don’t think that’s it at all,” the professor
replied. “Look at the robe. She’s actually adorning Venus.” What?
Almost as if he had been fishing for that answer, the
professor began his first lecture of the semester arguing for a way of looking
at art that, instead of the “Joe-college method” (his term) that criticized
literature and art based on power, actually paid attention to style and how
style expresses ontology. For the first time, I had a class concerned with
things like beauty, truth, feeling, and transcendence. It was the class I
hadn’t known I needed.
More than Just
Some Pears
Then we got to St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” I had read
the “Confessions” once before in a freshman seminar at Oxy. That professor was
a well-respected political theorist, but why he believed himself qualified to
lecture on the “Confessions” is still beyond me. When we were discussing young
Augustine’s theft of the pears, he threw up his hands.
“I don’t really get why he’s so concerned about some
pears,” the professor said. “Augustine seems really wracked by guilt, which is
probably just him back-projecting his Christianity onto his childhood
memories.” It probably had something to do with his mother.
Even as a freshman, that didn’t satisfy me. Nothing in
the text supports such vulgar reductionism, but many in the class took the
professor at his word since he spoke from the chair of authority. Although I
wasn’t convinced of his neo-Freudian dismissal, I still didn’t know why Augustine
spent six pages talking about some unripe pears. It is just as likely my
professor was the one projecting.
Fast-forward to senior year. Once again, I was reading
the “Confessions.” Once again, I was reading about the pears. But this time,
instead of writing St. Augustine off as a self-involved, typically guilt-ridden
Christian, our professor turned our eyes to the text. Doing so taught us that
when you don’t understand a text—especially one regarded as classic—the problem
might not be the text. The problem might be you.
“What was it, then, that pleased me in that act of
theft?” Augustine asks. The pears were unripe and he had plenty good ones of
his own. He and his friends just threw the pears to pigs right after they
picked them. What was the point? Were they merely after destruction?
“Here was the slave,” Augustine says, writing about
himself, “who ran away from his master and chased a shadow instead! What an
abomination! What a parody of life! What abysmal death!”
If God is the creator of all that is good, and if for God
“evil does not exist,” then destruction for
its own sake is monstrous because it is an attempt to undo, to negate
creation itself. Evil, ultimately, is non-existence. The destroyer, of pears or
dignity or life, effectively tells God: “I wish you had not created.”
At least other sins have the benefit of pointing, however
tenuously, toward something good. Someone else might steal because gold and
silver are beautiful—after all, God created precious metals. Covetous theft is
a redeemable sin. It’s evidence that we need to get our loves in order. Love of
destruction however, being a love of nothing, cannot be redeemed. There’s no
life there—it is indeed an “abysmal death.”
In the “Confessions,” I encountered someone taking sin
seriously. My freshman-year politics professor didn’t understand how a small
sin could have cosmic significance—it had to be explained as sexual repression.
But this time I saw Augustine’s guilt not as overwrought Christian
shame-mongering, but as the proper response to the deadliness of sin.
People Who Really
Experiment Find the Old Things Are True
By senior year, I had left Obama’s dorm for an off-campus
house, where I lived with fellow members of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
Around the same time I was reading the “Confessions,” I had the good fortune to
find a friend’s copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book of letters, essays, and notes,
“The Crack-Up,” left forgotten in my living room. Thumbing through it, I found
this fragment: “You and Seth can be radicals and show your children how you
look in the bathtub, because you’re both so good, but people who really
experiment with themselves find out that all the old things are true.”
The fragment conveys so much: the utopian naiveté of
radicals who trample on the good sense of tradition, and are convinced they are
“so good” nothing bad could come of their experiments. It also expresses the
hard-won realization of someone who has really experimented with herself, and
found that the good sense of tradition, that old wisdom, was right all along.
It reminds me of the strident calls on Oxy’s campus to
throw off the old constraints on sexuality and “really experiment” with
yourself. We’re all so good. What could
possibly go wrong? But Oxy has seen what goes wrong. The sexual assault
charges, Justice Department lawsuits, news reports, and even a feature-length
documentary have exposed it. So perhaps the “sex-positive” activists will one
day, after having really experimented, come back around like Fitzgerald’s
narrator: the pilgrim’s regress.
My long-suffering parents, who lived through my
adolescent derision of their bourgeois lifestyles and conservative politics,
managed to exasperate me in every political debate we had. I knew the argument
was over when they said (and I would groan every time), “Well, Ryan, man is
fallen.” For them, sin was (and is) the foundation of all sociology and
politics. If you ignore man’s incorrigible sinfulness, your theory is
worthless.
Coming across that Fitzgerald fragment summoned up all my
memories of their stubborn insistence on original sin (though as Presbyterians
they wouldn’t use the term). Augustine had revealed man’s fatal attraction to
the metaphysical nothingness of evil 1,600 years ago, just as my parents had
been telling me something even older: when God told Adam “of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it
you shall die,” God had been right—so don’t forget it.
Sin Means No
Utopias This Side of Heaven
Edmund Burke praised his country’s “sullen resistance to
innovation,” because it had helped Britons to remember that “no discoveries are
to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in
the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born.” Pace Justice Kennedy, the mere passage
of time does not confer upon us new dispensations to (re-)“define a liberty
that remains urgent in our own era.”
If sin is the most basic fact of social science, then
utopia will never come, and no amount of “sex-positive” sexual education will
get us there, no matter what Comedy Central’s John Oliver thinks. Wealth,
knowledge, and freedom are good, but we are always, always capable of misusing
them—and we always will.
Sure, we will gradually come to see certain things in a
better light, at a different angle, but not in a new light. The light remains
the same. Thus, Burke advises, “I would make the reparation as nearly as
possible in the style of the building.” Just as an architect ought to repair a
Gothic church in keeping with its style, and not with a modern steel and glass
addition, so every community should reform itself in keeping with its own
tradition and history.
That is, partly, what made Martin Luther King Jr.
successful. He didn’t advocate a revolution that would tear up the
Constitution—he appealed to it, as well as, crucially, to the biblical values
of justice and destiny present in our national psyche since long before the
American Revolution. In “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis makes a similar
provision for reform: “From within the Tao
[the ultimate good] itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao.” Merely sitting in the chair of
authority, while holding no respect for the Tao,
is dangerous, which my professor’s pronouncement on Augustine’s repressed
sexuality amply demonstrates.
During senior year, as I pored over the “Confessions” in
class and chanced upon Fitzgerald at home, I began to understand why I felt so
alienated from my readings and my classes. I had begun my history degree in
order to understand the world by examining its past. I wanted to see the past
as clearly as possible; my professors and fellow students wanted to see through
it:
“Augustine was just repressed and in love with his
mother.”
“‘The Birth of Venus’ is just a repression of
femininity.”
I heard a story about a student sitting through a lecture
on Wordsworth’s chauvinism. In the middle of the lecture, she raised her hand
and asked, “Wouldn’t it be better if Wordsworth had never been born?” In reply,
the lecturer just shrugged. They want to kill Wordsworth!
In the “Analects,” Confucius expresses precisely my own
motivation for studying history, but in pithier terms than I could manage: “I
am simply one who loves the past and is diligent in investigating it.” I felt
so alienated at Oxy, I realized, because I loved the past. I didn’t want to
kill it. I was, I realized, a conservative.
Two Views of the
Root Causes
Radicals and conservatives agree on one thing: the
solution to misery requires getting to the root of things. For radicals, this
means overturning the institutions that uphold society’s most fundamental
form(s) of oppression. For a Marxist, capitalism. For a feminist, patriarchy.
For conservatives, however, addressing the root means
finding ways to constrain sin and cultivate virtue. That’s why conservatism can
find an ally in republican government—no prince is immune to the temptations of
power, although neither are the masses. Thus, when the rule of law is paired
with representative government, we’re protected from two tyrants: the
dictatorship of absolute power and the dictatorship of absolute desire. At the
same time, we are free to form voluntary associations—synagogues, churches, and
mosques, most notably—where we practice virtue together.
I do not mean to deny social sin. Taken together, we
perpetrate evils that are uniquely structural and social. For example, lots of
white people with no feelings of particular racial animus can still create and
acquiesce to systems of administration and sociality that exclude and oppress
minorities. But I am convinced that sin is nevertheless a personal problem.
Race, actually, serves as an illustrative example.
In a world of mostly benign white people unintentionally
excluding and even exploiting minorities (let’s call our example “the United
States”), the white people are probably unaware of their implicit biases
against black people. Whites in the United States—and I include myself—more
quickly associate blackness with criminality, poverty, and lower education, if
only on an unconscious level.
But even when we acknowledge our implicit biases (I
recommend the Implicit Association Test on this score), we are largely
incapable of rooting those biases out. It’s not so different, as Jim Wallis has
suggested, from original sin: we can see it, we can acknowledge it, we can
struggle against it, but left to our own devices, we’ll never actually get rid
of it. So while we should certainly repair our institutions in order to
diminish the aggregate effects of implicit bias, those reforms will never be
enough.
Reform, progress, revolution—none of it will ever be
enough. Perhaps I’m wrong about the implacability of racism in the United
States (although I doubt it). About the implacability of sin, however, I’m as
certain as I am about anything. G.K. Chesterton called it “the only part of
Christian theology which can really be proved.”
Until we are all united around the banquet table of
eternity, we “groan inwardly” just as creation itself “has been groaning in
labor pains until now.” Despite our groaning, despite the agony of a broken
world, we should not strive for utopia. After all, Someone has already
striven—for something much better. When He returns in glory, it will be far
more radical than any Marxist could imagine. Until that time comes, we set
about the task of repair, as nearly as possible in the style of the building.
That is why I am a conservative.
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