Nostalgic bullying

Andrew Sullivan relays complaints from three writers, Leon Wieseltier, Molly Worthen and Rod Dreher, who are uncomfortable with the DIY approaches to religion adopted by many Americans. Worthen expresses the nub of their common complaint. "An institution" such as the Catholic church

forces you to have, for at least part of your life, a respect for authority that inculcates the sense that you have something to learn, that you’re not reinventing the wheel, but that millennia have come before you.

The loss of such authority is in my view a good riddance. On the plane of dogma, it means that those who confuse their close analysis of the fantasies derived from ancient fables with actual knowledge are not fooling anyone but atavists like themselves. On an institutional level, we've learned, or should have learned, that those credited an authority alleged to derive from God are likely to abuse it.

A fitting coda for 9/11/11

Leon Wieseltier implicitly acknowledges the many things that have gone wrong in the U.S. since 9/11 but affirms that we maintain our core virtue and ability to self-correct.  Looking back at my brief lament, I appreciate his superior balance:

It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done. What we loved and what we valued has survived the disaster, but it needs to be secured and bettered, and in that secure and better condition transmitted to our children. Our dream of greatness must be accompanied by an understanding of what is required for the maintenance of greatness. The obscenities of September 11, 2001 exposed the difference between builders and destroyers. We are builders. Let us agree, on this anniversary, that it is an honor to be an American and it is an honor to be free.

"Last of the postwar liberals"

Leon Wieseltier has a memorable tribute to Holbrooke:

On the day that Holbrooke suffered the cataclysmic collapse from which he never recovered, The New York Times reported that Henry Kissinger—the Republicans’ most accomplished Machiavellian—remarked in 1973 that “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Such unforgettably filthy words would never have crossed Richard Holbrooke’s lips. In government and out, not least in his groundbreaking work at Refugees International, his career was a loud and effective refutation of that chilling “maybe.”

Quote of the Day

Yes, ground zero is a sacred place; my wife’s ashes are in that ground. But to deny the opportunity to worship lawfully near there is denying what is most sacred for all Americans: freedom.

         William Nelson
         West Lebanon, N.H., Sept. 6, 2010
         New York Times, Letters, Sept. 13, 2010

This beautiful letter compresses Leon Wieseltier's incandescent core argument regarding Park51:

Nationalism has always arrogated to itself a hallowing power, and the sanctification of Ground Zero is the natural expression of the memory of a nation. But this is a secular sanctity. I see no justification for establishing a mosque, a church, or a synagogue at Ground Zero, even though Muslims, Christians, and Jews died there. (Irreligious people also died there.) Yet nobody is proposing to establish a mosque at Ground Zero. Sacralization is an act of demarcation: its force is owed to its precision. Outside the line is outside the line. Park Place is outside the line, in the “profane” realm.

"Its force is owed to its precision": Wieseltier's definitive defense of Park51

I have read twisted and perverse arguments by Leon Wieseltier, but I am in awe of the moral clarity he brings to the debate over Park51, the proposed Islamic Center two blocks from Ground Zero. Its force comes in part by cutting through a bit of cant deployed in support of the project and in defense of Islam generally, and in part by consolidation of common-sense arguments already deployed, and perhaps from some structural progression in his the argument that I can't divine. But essentially, it's a matter of clear thinking informed by internalized principles --  and precision of language.

It's a short piece, and I have no excuse for excerpting it beyond the admirer's impulse to hold jewels up to the light. Here are four of them (with my emphasis):

1. Tossing the red herring

I have no quarrel with the construction of Cordoba House, but not because Islam is a religion of peace. It is not. Like Christianity and like Judaism, Islam is a religion of peace and a religion of war. All the religions have all the tendencies within them, and in varying historical circumstances varying beliefs and practices have come to the fore...Apologetic definitions of Islam will not avail anybody in this struggle.

2. Sacred space defined

[Ground Zero's] is a secular sanctity. I see no justification for establishing a mosque, a church, or a synagogue at Ground Zero, even though Muslims, Christians, and Jews died there. (Irreligious people also died there.) Yet nobody is proposing to establish a mosque at Ground Zero. Sacralization is an act of demarcation: its force is owed to its precision. Outside the line is outside the line. Park Place is outside the line, in the “profane” realm.

Sullivan's Song of Myself

Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's cultural editor, has stirred up a hurtful brouhaha with a broadside against Andrew Sullivan implying that Sullivan's sometimes intemperate criticism of Israel and AIPAC is antisemitic. To be more precise, since Wieseltier prides himself on precision of argument, he accuses Sullivan of indulging in tropes and patterns of association that are favored by antisemites. He avoids a straight charge of antisemitism, protesting, "it is impossible to know what is in a man’s heart; but on the basis of what Sullivan has written, I would urge him to search his heart." But his assertion that "Sullivan looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left" pretty much seals the deal.

Wieseltier's attack reads almost like a parody of an accusation of antisemitism, so slender are the alleged taproots from Sullivan's comments into the classic antisemitic tropes Wieseltier identifies in them. Sullivan often shoots from the hip, and some of his accusations and judgmental pronouncements are unsupported; recently he has turned his ire against Israel's actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the settlements. Drained of the poison of the antisemitism charge, Wieseltier's complaints about the emotionalism, the lack of editorial superego in Sullivan's blogging (some of it), might have some force. Jeffrey Goldberg has called out Sullivan's indiscipline in denouncing recent Israeli conduct more temperately and more effectively than Wieseltier. Wieseltier's attempted takedowns even of Sullivan's logic fail on their own terms.