A Complaint Against Liberal Modernity, and a Solution: Faith

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/books/review/the-unbroken-thread-sohrab-ahmari.html

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THE UNBROKEN THREADDiscovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of ChaosBy Sohrab Ahmari

“The Unbroken Thread” is a partisan cri de coeur about the liberal West’s moral bewilderment from which, Sohrab Ahmari tells us, conservative Catholicism offers safe rescue. It merits attention not for diagnostic sharpness or strong argument, of which more in a moment, but because Ahmari is a notable combatant in the fight on the American right for the future of conservatism. Is conservatism to be socially liberal or, as he prefers, a moral crusade against secular misunderstandings and misuses of freedom?

Iranian-born but raised in the United States and a convert to Catholicism, Ahmari is op-ed editor of the conservative, Murdoch-owned New York Post, which last year endorsed Donald Trump. He also writes a column in the conservative religious journal First Things. Although no foe of Western capitalism, Ahmari is aghast at what he takes for its ethical and spiritual desolation. He writes, as from a height, “When I soberly examine the West as it really is, I find much wanting in its worldview and way of life.”

By “the West,” Ahmari means mostly present-day American society. By “as it really is,” he marks a disputatious contrast running through the book, dwelt on at times, unspoken at others. For him, there is present-day society seen and judged as it should be on spiritual, counter-Enlightenment standards and that same society — together with the unlucky, baffled folk trapped within it — as falsely described and wrongly celebrated by secular liberals. This is heady stuff, but Ahmari is not daunted.

Behind him lies a tradition of complaint against liberal modernity that runs with little pause from the 19th century to now, rich with eminent names: the poet-essayists Coleridge and Eliot, the aesthetic thinker Roger Scruton, the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the historian of ideas Eric Voegelin and the neoconservative social critics Daniel Moynihan and Daniel Bell. And that’s just those writing in English.

If their many differences are disregarded, criticism from such thinkers can be gathered into an imposing, all-round indictment: Liberal modernity is amoral, ugly or dog-eat-dog. By slipping divine authority, the charge runs, critical philosophy has left morality with no anchorage but personal avowal or local custom; by banishing ethical and aesthetic arbiters, liberal-democratic education has robbed people of guides about how to live well and what to cherish; by elevating personal choice and dissolving ties of community, the free market has created a social free-for-all.

The challenge for conservative anti-moderns in politics is less whether such a global indictment is accurate or fair but whether anyone is listening to them. Political liberals have tended to rub their eyes, unable to recognize themselves, their history or their outlook. Political conservatives have largely paid lip service or shrugged and got on with the worldly business of winning and holding power. At that last task, indeed, they have proved so successful as to underpin and largely dominate a modern West in which “values” conservatives find themselves little or no home. Values conservatives, in short, have often read the lesson but rarely, if ever, led the service.

Although practiced at inner-party warfare, Ahmari here works on a bigger canvas. In his first half — “The Things of God” — we are told, in sequence, that science is not the only knowledge, theology need not fight philosophy, sabbaths are a good thing, religion is more than ritual, and politics, together with morality, needs divine authority. In the second half — “The Things of Humankind” — Ahmari urges people to honor their parents, not to expect always to think for themselves and to grasp that religious and sexual liberty mask “deeper unfreedom.” A final chapter recalls advice from Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who tutored Nero, not to worry unduly about death.

This crowded menu is set out in short chapters headed by punchy questions: “Is God reasonable?” for example, or “Is sex a private matter?” Ahmari answers each with the help of an exemplary life. This can work well when his subject’s biography bears visibly on the topic. On the need for daily prayer and sabbath observance, we meet an American professor of Jewish mysticism; on ritual and religion, we are introduced to a British cultural anthropologist. The device works badly with great philosophers or religious thinkers whose subtle works are cherry-picked for counter-liberal ammunition. Augustine’s thoughts on church and state, Aquinas’s on what theology owes to philosophy, Newman’s on freedom of thought and papal authority. These topics are not illuminated, even in summary form, by relying on the potted life story.

Keen as he is to fight, there is much that Ahmari’s foes, whether liberal progressives or liberal conservatives, can warm to. He sees that ideas matter in politics and regrets intellectual over-specialization. He invokes religious traditions beside his chosen one, notably Judaism and Confucianism. He includes a progressive Christian, Howard Thurman, author of “Jesus and the Disinherited” (1949), which Martin Luther King admired. Ahmari opens and closes, touchingly, with a staple of moral homily: the proper upbringing of the young.

The book’s virtues, however, struggle throughout with a damaging vice: the abuse of tradition. In this, Ahmari is at least evenhanded. He caricatures not just liberalism but his own faith by attributing to it more unity, simplicity and authority than historically it has ever possessed.

He mangles the divisive 1870 Catholic battle over papal infallibility, for example, by leaving out the vocal minority of dissident bishops from France, Germany, England and the United States. He misrepresents recent Catholic neo-Thomism, a flourishing tradition well represented by the philosopher John Finnis, who taught the Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. Finnis, like Aquinas, accepts that believers must argue with nonbelievers.

As for political liberals, Ahmari relies on parody to represent what they believe. Liberals do not set liberty against authority but against submission to arbitrary, unchecked authority. They do not set a person’s sense of themselves against community roots but against unchosen, often subordinate membership in a clan or social group. Liberal reluctance to police morals by law does not rob morals of their authority. Ahmari urges us to respect tradition but exploits it himself with polemical disregard.

Why belabor such flaws? “The Unbroken Thread” is unlikely to edify or divert readers not already persuaded by its claims. It earns notice, however, as a telling specimen of significant opinion on the American right. To steal a phrase of Newman’s, it is a “tract for the times.” After so much high-level acrobatics, it is worth returning to earth with Ahmari’s party-political vision and who he sees as his allies.

In a manifesto that bears another read, “The New American Right: An Outline for a Post-Fusionist Conservatism” in First Things (October 2019), Ahmari looked to “populist and conservative-nationalist movements on both sides of the Atlantic” to help the new right “re-erect lost barriers” after “decades of liberty without end.” The new right’s greatest priority was “to resist efforts by liberals, both progressive and conservative, to oppose by underhanded procedural means the desire voters are expressing for a politics of the common good.”

That echoes not Augustine, Aquinas or Newman but the mood music of the hard right from the past two centuries: the people in thrall to deceitful elites, awaiting deliverance by those who know and tell the truth. “Bad theology has consequences,” Ahmari tells us. So have bad ideas.