Our Orwellian Memorial Day
Our soldiers did not die for abstractions, but rather to defend something far closer to the American character.
One of my favorite reads is Lapham’s Quarterly. Consisting of a curation of writing from the classics to the postmodern era, it is typically centered around a single theme.
Appropriate for Memorial Day, the theme for Spring 2023 is freedom.
Curtis White opens up this season’s edition with an exposition on the word that should scare the hell out of anyone who does not share his expression of the term, that being one from the far left of the American political spectrum:
In our own moment, progressive activists resist what they see as the opposite of freedom: slavery. Modern slavery takes the forms of work and debt, of legislation limiting a woman’s authority over her own body, of racist segregation, and of the prison-industrial complex, to name but a few examples. Our world is not so different from the one described by Belinda, a woman enslaved for fifty years in eighteenth century Massachusetts, where “lawless domination sits enthroned, pouring bloody outrage and cruelty on all who dare to be free.”
The rest of this jeremiad becomes nearly impossible to read.
One of the employments of rhetoric typically identified as Jesuitical — and yes, it is a pejorative — is the employment of casuistry. Namely, rather than what most folks are used to — if A then B, if B then C — one gets something akin to “if A then C, if C then most certainly B.”
The catch being that if you agree with A to C, then you forfeit B regardless as to whether or not B is true for the simple reason that you have not only admitted C, but to admit otherwise is to admit the most heinous of moral failings among the uneducated — that you were wrong about C.
Or to put Mr. White’s casuistry into his own words:
The opposite of freedom is slavery. (A)
Here is a depiction of slavery with which we can all agree. (C)
Ergo, modern slavery takes these forms. (B)
Once you see the tactic, it is difficult to unsee it. Once attuned, it is difficult not to see it employed in most of our politics as perhaps the most damnable sort of mischaracterization of one’s opponent. Which Mr. White continues to do in his very next paragraph:
The voice of economic privilege uses the idea of freedom in order to claim the right to deploy property to its own rich advantage. Making matters worse, others on the political right have weaponized freedom to advance along a list of grievances about what they believe has been wrongly taken from them. Some of these grievances are legitimate; neoliberalism has indeed denied many people the work that once gave them economic independence and a sense of self-worth. But that legitimate complaint has gotten tangled with terrible things, especially the perception of those on the right talking about freedom that they have been “replaced” by racial minorities, liberated women, and the LGBTQ community. So they set out to “own the libs” and reclaim their lost freedoms through the public display of their resentments (aka rioting), with guns on their hips if they so choose (and they usually do). This is freedom as understood by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength.
There’s another attribute that can also be called Jesuitical — not as a pejorative — which I was taught by my grandfather and was reinforced by several of my teachers and professors over time.
Simply stated, you do not understand your own argument unless you understand the argument of your opposition.
Straw men notwithstanding, one finds his characterization to be predominant among most of the intelligentsia and talking heads of the political left, mimicked with some degree of success by the political right as they settle into the new rules of political combat.
To wit? White mentions the corrosive effects of neoliberalism; few people would disagree (A). White is careful to point out rioting yet neglects to mention the public looting and burning of the summer of 2020 (B1). White alludes to January 6th rioters; White neglects to mention October 8th where such dissent was the highest form of democracy (B2). White alludes to the violence and intolerance of the alt-right; White barely mentions the mainstreaming of groups such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (B3). As if to convince us, White invokes no less an authority than Orwell; yet the irony that this blade is double-edged seems to escape White’s capacity for either empathy or introspection (C).
Yet notice again the rhetoric. If you agree with A and C, then you must admit B or else one risks being on the side of warmongers, slavers, and the ignorant quod est demonstratum.
Does any of that sound even remotely honest? More concerningly, does any of that serve the cause of freedom? Or is it the very coercion — “lawless domination sits enthroned, pouring bloody outrage and cruelty on all who dare to be free” — which all free people should instinctively resist?
Timothy Keller and the Limits of Freedom
Contrast this with the thoughts of the late evangelical theologian Timothy Keller, who passed away last week at 71 years of age:
Never describe the view of an opponent in a way he or she will not own. Rather describe their view so they say, "I couldn't have put it better myself." Only then should you proceed to refute the view. If instead you caricature your opponent-- you persuade no one.
Writing in the pages of The Public Discourse, it was no less than Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York who wrote the most touching of obituaries to the man, the most unlikely — or perhaps, most likely — of friendships:
He once asked me if I could help him trace the quote “Joy is the infallible sign of God’s presence,” and was pleased when I came up with the French Catholic writer Leon Bloy. As he would again cite his friend N. T. Wright, “Trouble is, when we preach the ‘good news’ it usually comes across as neither.” But Tim’s preaching conveyed both. One of my own young Catholic adults observed, “If you cry at Redeemer, it’s not because you’re bored to tears, and they’re not tears of gloom, . . . they’re tears of joy.”
One of the hallmarks of neoliberalism is the high price put on the concept of freedom, or more accurately, the right of personal autonomy as the highest good, where freedom is a vehicle in service to this most preeminent of rights.
This is what produces the rightly felt fear of many a liberal distinct from a leftist where any restriction of freedom is tantamount to enslavement; any enhancement of freedom is the definition of liberty — even if such liberties stray into the twin extremes of tyranny or license. Progress is its own secular deity in this sense, with its very own priests, creeds, and inquisitors.
Progress — that cardinal virtue of postmoderns and cultural Hegelians alike — is the sole arbiter of good and evil, and that which opposes progress must be opposed up to and including the use of coercion and violence. If Marcuse is right that error has no rights and that institutions share in the collective guilt of coercive activity, then every act — including violence — is morally permissible so long as it is in service to progress, with freedom being the vehicle serving whatever expands the sphere of one’s personal autonomy.
That’s how you get the “Summer of Love” in 2020.
Yet freedom is not a good unto itself.
One will notice that freedom is typically in service to some other end, and when directed towards the self — personal autonomy — as the highest good, one discovers that we are not an end unto ourselves by a mile. One day, we will all die. Whether you believe we will go to meet our Creator or whether we pass on the pageantry of human existence to other generations, the simple fact of the matter is that the universe doesn’t exist for our sole consumptive benefit.
There is something deeper. Something more.
Freedom Exists for the Sake of Love, Not Manipulation
Memorial Day is often a time where abstractions are used to justify the sacrifice made on the so-called Altar of Freedom. Our soldiers from various wars — and yes, even the recent unpleasantness — fought for varying definitions of freedom.
Yet one doubts if you ask many veterans why soldiers sacrifice themselves for their country if their motivations are really rooted in such abstractions such as freedom. Love of country might be closer to the mark, but patriotism is another abstraction. Did the men who fought at Monmouth, the Sunken Road, Chateau-Theirry or Normandy fight for mere abstractions?
Allow me to suggest that there is a deeper and more personal reason involved than mere freedom:
Limitation of one's freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.
We accept limits on our freedom all the time. One of the earliest limitations on our freedom is our own ignorance, which we liberate ourselves from through education. Our enslavement to passions is remedied through our commitment to reason, delaying immediate pleasures for the sake of future happiness. Our disposition to violence and manipulation is limited when we respect those around us, not as things to be used but as persons much like ourselves worthy of individual dignity.
This quote? Pope John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility — which if more people read it, I suspect we would begin the task of building the world Robert F. Kennedy asked us to consider, taming the savageness of man and making gentle the life of the world.
What Really Matters This Memorial Day
This love — whether it is comrades in arms, families at home, or the freedom to achieve true freedom — is the only freedom worth considering. No one dies for license unless it is in the slow effort of self-consumption. No one dies for tyranny unless it is the endless and soulless aggregation of power for its own sake.
The enemy of this love? Manipulation and use — the pure reduction of human beings as things, the eradication of romance, the abandonment of the metaphysical values of good and beauty and truth in substitution for things evil, mediocre, and base.
If the only basis is freedom in service to self, then much of what we do in politics is built entirely upon power. Couch the word however we would like — agency, autonomy, tyranny, license — but I doubt very seriously that those who have gone before us died so that we could do whatever we damned well please, up to and beyond who we might hurt in the process.
I am not sure the answer has a word. Yet it does have an expression, and in the finest Jesuitical tradition, perhaps it is best expressed by our (former) opposition:
"The tunnel digging may be futile. The stand on Iwo Jima may be futile. Maybe the whole war is futile. Would you give up then? We will defend this island until we are dead! Until the very last soldier is dead! If our children can live safely for one more day, it would be worth the one more day that we defend this island."
-- Ken Watanabe as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, "Letters From Iwo Jima" (2006)
It’s not freedom, but freedom-towards-persons that are the stakes. Nor is it progress for its own sake, but progress-on-whose-behalf that really gets to the nub of the question. Manipulating that conversation towards a discrete and political end doesn’t do anyone any justice. Realizing that freedom has limits — that takes a certain quality of sacrifice which our veterans understand and too many have forgotten.
Pushing beyond Orwellian discourse — and respecting the sacrifice of those who unique in all of history have allowed us the latitude and freedom do so — should be on our minds this Memorial Day.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.