Wieseltier’s “wrath of G-d” act never disappoints, does it?
I realize this post may be a little outdated, but you see I was on “Wieseltier time,” which I spent so much more fruitfully than blogging. I sculpted a bit, read some Talmud, and savored the memory of a chocalate souffle I ate in 1986. I also spent some time looking at a blackbird, but only made it up to six ways.
Leon Wieseltier, feeling a bit concerned with President Obama’s Chicago-born pragmatism, writes:
I want the president to tell the American people that, contrary to what they have been taught for many years, government is a jewel of human association and an heirloom of human reason; that government, though it may do ill, does good; that a lot of the good that government does only it can do; that the size of government must be fitted to the size of its tasks, and so, for a polity such as ours, big government is the only government; that strong government comports well with strong freedom, unless Madison was wrong…
It goes on like this (it’s a really long sentence) for a ways, to the point that I’m not even certain that he cares what he’s saying so long as he maintains a suitably bombastic tone throughout.
Whence exactly does Mr. Wieseltier think the state came? The head of Zeus? A land down under? Did it float to us upon a butterscotch waterfall?
The state originated as a resource-extracting and war-making apparatus constructed to serve the interests of a dynastic warrior class. That changed over time, obviously, but our founders certainly never forgot its origins and never believed it could be wholly free of them.
I would be more understanding if Mr. Wieseltier limited his panegyrics to our capacity for self-government — which truly is an extraordinary accomplishment, and rare, in the history of our species. But he has to go whole hog and exalt the state itself. So he ropes in James Madison, willy-nilly, to his Wilsonian cause, without pausing for a second to reflect on whether Madison might be appalled at what has become of the government he helped foster.
It is, in some perverse way, to his credit that Mr. Wieseltier doesn’t resort to Jamesian pragmatism: he really does love big government, and endows it with moral and aesthetic splendor. I had almost accused him of neglecting Madison’s dictum about war being the health of the state, but then I recalled Mr. Wieseltier’s enthusiasm for quixotic foreign policy adventures.
He concludes with the line
The justification of belief is a human adventure. And discovering the reason is like discovering the sunrise.
Read literally, that makes no sense. Who the hell ever discovered a sunrise? The first man? The smart ape from 2001? Unless he just means it in a “Best Things in Life” desktop calendar sort of way. Even as a metaphor, it stinks. One thing about the sunrise: it’s pretty dependable. As far as the Earth is concerned, it’s been occurring with great frequency for the past 4.5 billion years. Now, belief in human beings, on the other hand? Dollars to doughnuts they’ll disappoint you almost every time (that’s why we tend to view government with skepticism).
Still, one must give credit where credit is due. In his follow-up, Mr. Wieseltier remarks of Andrew Sullivan that
Sullivan’s outrage at my failure of transcription disguises a problem. It is that he is a hero-worshipper, but all his heroes do not go together. He reveres Reagan and he reveres Obama. That is to say, he admires conceptions of government that contradict each other. I do not see how Reagan’s views of the national government can be pressed into the service of Obama’s plans for the national government.
Indeed. Alas, Mr. Sullivan didn’t show much interest in retorting. Perhaps it’s a good thing: the prospect of a Sullivan-Wieseltier self-importance-off is almost too mindblowing to contemplate.