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A new idea for a traditionalist America
Ezra F. writes:
Orthodox Jews, who are philosophical conservatives and moral traditionalists, would (I think) happily accept the notion of America as a coalition of groups, most but not all of which are religiously defined. The coalition of these groups would be understood as having been formed on the basis of (1) a shared acceptance of natural moral law, and (2) a shared acceptance of the method of realizing natural moral law that is articulated by the American Constitution, interpreted according to its original intent. (Individuals and groups that don’t accept natural moral law—secular liberals and Muslims, for example—would not really belong to the American coalition, but their presence could be tolerated as long as their behavior is correct, I suppose. As for non-religiously-affiliated people who accept natural moral law on rational grounds rather than on the basis of divine revelation—“philosophers”—either such people would constitute a group in their own right, or each individual philosopher would could count as a single-member group.)
But, because of their religious obligation to conceive of themselves as a nation in their own right, Orthodox Jews would have difficulty accepting the notion of America as a nation, where “nation” is understood as entailing shared ethnicity, religious faith, manners, songs, stories, and so on. It seems to me that the notion of America as a natural-law-based coalition of groups is just as compatible with traditionalism as is the notion of America as a nation, since someone who endorses this notion of America could hold that (a) it is better for an individual to belong to a tradition-defined natural-law-accepting group than for him not to belong to a tradition-defined, natural-law-accepting group, and that (b) each tradition-defined natural-law-accepting group will prosper in proportion to the degree to which tradition-defined natural-law-accepting groups dominate the coalition.
For example, it can be urged that Orthodox Jews are better off in a coalition dominated by conservative Protestants and Catholics than in a coalition dominated by liberal Protestants and Catholics. The coalition couldn’t be dominated from within by secular liberals, since secular liberals reject natural moral law and are therefore not members of the coalition; the coalition could only be dominated from without by the alien power of secular liberals, and this would of course not be good for any of the groups that are members of the coalition.
I know, or at any rate think I know, that you would reject the America-as-coalition notion even though it can be proposed that the coalition-members be understood as natural-law-accepting groups, and even though it can urged that these groups be defined by traditional beliefs and practices. I’d like you to help me by spelling out why you reject this notion.
LA replies:
My dictionary defines natural law as “a rule or body of rules of conduct inherent in human nature and essential to or binding upon human society.” This seems to be essentially the same as Leo Strauss’s definition of natural right as that which is by nature right or that which is intrinsically right.
The idea of defining membership in a political society on the basis of subscription to a philosophical or moral affirmation ought to pique the interest of traditionalists. But how would this plan work? Would it take the form of a creed pertaining to the general existence of natural law or natural right in itself, e.g., “I believe that there are certain things that are intrinsically right or wrong”? Or would it take the form of a creed pertaining to particular things that are right and wrong, e.g., “I believe that murder, theft, adultery, coveting others’ goods, giving false witness, taking God’s name in vain, and worshipping idols are intrinsically wrong, and that honoring one’s father and mother is intrinsically right, and I also believe in the U.S. Constitution as amended, understood according to its original intent”? Notice that all the affirmations in this creed come from the Ten Commandments—universal laws relating to man’s relationship with God and man—plus allegiance to the Constitution.
Notwithstanding its superficial attractiveness, the problem with this proposal is the problem with modern conservatism generally: it treats America as a set of shared universal principles, plus an allegiance to the Constitution (a problematic allegiance given that that much of the Constitution has been turned on its head by liberal judicial rulings of the last 70 years). But America is more than shared universal principles plus the Constitution. America is a concrete society, a historical nation and people, defined by a majority culture. Furthermore, the very crises we are currently undergoing are largely due to the fact that that concrete nation and its majority culture have been delegitimized over the last four decades, leaving us only with “principles” and “values” to hold us together. Having only principles and values to hold us together (plus an increasingly abstract allegiance to a Constitution that has been increasingly turned into its opposite), this system has opened itself to multiculturalism.
Which leads to the next problem with the proposal. By defining the common nation out of existence or simply leaving it out of the picture, the proposal amounts to a form of multiculturalism, even if it’s a traditionalist form of multiculturalism. As with ordinary multiculturalism, the motivating impulse for this traditionalist multiculturalism is not the well-being of the nation, but the well being of a minority group or group of minority groups. In this case the minority group is Orthodox Jews. You don’t want America to be defined as a nation because Orthodox Jews could not be members in such a nation—and the reason for this, in your words, is that Orthodox Jews have a “religious obligation to conceive of themselves as a nation in their own right.” Thus the motivating impulse for defining this natural law- and Constitution-based America as not being a nation is to accommodate Orthodox Jews.
It is therefore no surprise that the pro-minority double standard that we find in ordinary multiculturalism also obtains under your proposal. In your coalition of traditionalist groups, Orthodox Jews would continue to regard themselves as and to live as a distinct nation unto themselves, sharing with America’s other groups a shared universal morality and allegiance to the Constitution, but not a concrete identity as a nation and people. But what about the other groups? American Protestants, American Catholics, and American secular natural law believers do not have a Protestant nation, a Catholic nation, or a secular natural law nation. Their nation is America. But your plan takes away America as a nation, leaving the non-Jewish members of the coalition without a nation, while the Orthodox Jews get to continue enjoying their exclusive nationhood.
So, while your idea is very interesting and thought provoking, in its non-nation form it is unacceptable.
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On a side point, on what basis do you say that Muslims do not believe in natural law? Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but I’d like to see you spell it out.
Ezra F. replies:
I have to think about your objection that my suggestion leaves Jews as the only group in America with a real national identity. I suppose that by “nation” I only meant a deeply defined group (defined by a shared linguistic, religious, ancestral, behavioral, etc., background). And, American identity aside, Jews really are more deeply defined as a group than are, say, Presbyterians. Maybe non-Jewish Americans really do need to find a deep group identity in America rather than in intra-American groups. If deep group identity requires a shared religious doctrine and shared religious practices, then perhaps there really is a Christian American nationhood, since the religious differences between, say, Catholics and evangelical Protestants might be no greater than the religious differences between, say, Satmar Hasidism and Modern Orthodox Jews. Might it be possible to distinguish between the American nation and the American state, so as to allow Jews to think of themselves as citizens of the American state and obligatory allies of the American nation (that is, they are morally obliged to be allies of the American nation), but as members of the Jewish nation rather than of the American nation?
By the way, Jews think that the seven laws given to Noah (discussed at length in the Talmud—only a couple of them are stated in the Torah) are binding for all mankind; the Ten Commandments are binding only for Jews. The Seven Noahide laws are: (1) No idolatry; (2) No blasphemy; (3) No murder; (4) No theft; (5) No perverse sexual behavior; (6) No eating the flesh of a living animal (a weird one, I grant you, but it’s been interpreted as prohibiting cruelty to animals); (7) courts of law must be established in order to enforce the first six laws. Where the Commandments from Sinai correspond to these Noahide laws, they differ in subtle ways—for example, the Noahide law forbids theft, but not “coveting.” Also, the Sinaitic Commandment to observe the Sabbath clearly doesn’t apply to non-Jews, according to Jews; a non-Jew does nothing wrong when he drives or works on Friday evening or Saturday.
As for my comment that Muslims don’t accept natural moral law, I had in mind Robert Spencer’s observation (I think it was Robert Spencer, n one of his books, but I’d have to check) that there is no version of the Golden Rule in any authoritative Muslim text, as there is in the authoritative texts of virtually any other civilization.
LA replies:
I’m posting our exchange now. I’m not sure where this leaves us; these are difficult issues. But I must say that this is the first time I’ve seen a Jew explicitly state that Jews are religiously obligated to conceive of themselves as a nation in their own right. I’ve seen the problem stated less explicitly and definitively, as when Norman Podhoretz said in a speech many years ago that America is his country, and the Jews are his people. When I read that, I wondered, what is his relationship to non-Jewish Americans? Are they not his people?
In any case, the idea of a separate Jewish or Orthodox Jewish nation creates a problem with regard to Jews’ membership in the non-Jewish societies in which they live. Your notion that Jews might belong to the American state, not the American nation, while being obligated to be an ally of the American nation, may be worth exploring.
However, I will say this: If Jews are not members of the American nation, but have a special and protected status within it, that also means that Jews do not have the standing to pronounce on matters related to the American nation. In other words, Jews would have the right to live as a separate and special minority within America, and their rights would be protected, even as they declined to participate in American nationhood. But if that were the case, they would also not have the standing to participate in public debate in this country on what constitutes American nationhood, identity, peoplehood. If individual Jews wanted such standing, they would have to give up their membership in the Jewish nation and adopt the American nationhood as their own.
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George R. writes:
You wrote:
“If individual Jews wanted such standing, they would have to give up their membership in the Jewish nation and adopt the American nationhood as their own.”
It does not make much sense to me that a Jew who believed the Jews to be God’s chosen people should forfeit his membership in the nation of Israel, with its ancient, illustrious and supernatural history, in order to be a part of the American nation, which in comparison would seem like a fly-by-night operation.
LA replies:
Ok, that’s a reasonable statement, and it should be noted that I did not challenge Ezra’s statement that Orthodox Jews have a religious obligation to view themselves as a distinct nation.
But my point is, if Jews in America have their own nation, what is America supposed to think about that? The multicultural solution is to say that America is not a nation but a collection of groups. But if we reject the multicultural solution, then what? And my answer is, that if Jews feel themselves to be a distinct people, then they can go on existing as a minority in America and be protected as such and in their individual rights, but that they don’t have the right to speak for America as a nation.
James W. writes:
I don’t accept the very notion that Orthodox Jews are philosophical conservatives. If someone were to show me their voting pattern is less liberal than other Jews, I’ll stand corrected.
Not that Hassidic Jews are Orthodox Jews, but they are certainly not Liberal Jews, and I seem to recall Hillary putting 100% of them from one Manhattan district in her bag back in the day.
I find Jews who are actual political conservatives to be especially admirable precisely because they come from nowhere and have no support group, especially not in their own families. Everything they have learned they have learned though accepting the truth of contrary experience, which is only enabled by strength of character.
Mark W. writes:
I enjoyed your reasoning in “A new idea for a traditionalist America.” However, I think Ezra is correct regarding the incompatibility of Islam with Natural Law. If you Google the topic, you’ll find any number of links that suggest that the two are compatible. However, my understanding of orthodox Islamic thought is that it basically regards the world as created at every instant by a God whose sole will is law—everything that occurs is directly caused by God. This position is similar to the one that Benedict XVI famously discussed at Regensburg. What B16 did in that presentation was compare the Western voluntarists to Islamist thought. Now, the voluntarists held that deeds are right or wrong solely because God so designates them: if God decreed that adultery was OK then it would be, and so forth. That attitude is antithetical to natural law, but is also held (in my understanding) by Islam. That’s what B16 was getting at: he was suggesting that the problems in Western thought arise from a philosophical attitude that is not dissimilar to Islamic thought.
George R. replies:
You wrote to me in an e-mail:
“Ok, that’s a reasonable statement.
“But what is America supposed to think about that?”
To the extent that the Jews really are the chosen people of God, America should be part of their nation, or at least defer to it.
To the extent that they are not really the chosen people, America should be something distinct from Israel, and from all foreign nations. You’re right. America cannot not be a collection of various peoples tied together by some abstract principles—if it’s going to be a nation itself, that is.
LA replies:
Then there is the additional twist that both the Puritan settlers of 17th century New England, and the Revolutionary generation of the late 18th century, saw themselves as a new people of Israel.
Ezra F. replies to my earlier reply (posted March 14):
Here are a couple of thoughts and questions regarding the question of American and Jewish nationhood.
(1) Do you think of American nationhood as being an established fact, or as a work-in-progress that hasn’t been completed yet? I’m inclined to think that American nationhood is a very valuable work-in-progress, while Jewish nationhood is an established fact.
[LA replies: You’ve just given the standard left-multiculturalist view of America, that there is no historic American nation, that America is a work-in-progress, that America is “yet to be.” There are even school textbooks with titles like this. This view empowers the left to devalue and destroy America as a historic nation and re-engineer it as they want.
Further, again you don’t seem to see the double standard you want on behalf of the Jews. For you, the Jewish nation is an established fact and thus has a right to be protected as it is, but American nationhood is undetermined and plastic, and can be made into anything. You don’t realize the extent to which you have situated yourself outside America a a concrete country.]
(2) When you say that “If Jews are not members of the American nation…Jews would have the right to live as a separate and special minority within America”, I assume that you mean both that Jews would have the right to live as a separate and special minority within the territory of the United States, and that individual Jews would have a legal status within what I call the “American state” (a system of laws and institutions)that is the same as that of members of the American nation. This seems about right, except that the notion of the Jews as “protected” minority (your phrase is “special and protected status”) raises the question of what or who the protecting agency is. Of course, the American nation would be protecting the Jewish nation, but on the other hand the Jewish nation would also in some respects be protecting, or assisting in the protection of, the American nation; the large contribution made by the Jewish nation to the strength of American science and industry is surely a contribution to the protection of the American nation. Certainly, the American state protects the Jewish nation, but then the American state also protects the American nation. I suppose that here I am only motivated by pride, but I would prefer to think of the Jewish nation as being the junior partner in a mutually-protecting alliance with the American nation, than as the recipient of one-way protection. (I certainly do not deny that the Jewish nation receives much more protection from the American nation than the American nation receives from the Jewish nation!) Thanks for reading all of this.
LA replies:
Well, obviously, all loyal Americans want to and have a duty to protect America. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. I am simply trying to find a way to articulate the unusual situation you’ve presented, in which Jews are part of the American state but not of the American nation. In the past I’ve dealt with the same problem, but I put it in these terms: I said that minorities (including some Jews) who do not identify with the majority culture would still have their political and civil rights (and duties) as Americans, but that, since they do not identify with the majority culture, they do not have the right to participate in public debate about or be in any position to influence or direct that majority culture. What I’ve just said is simply logical and right. Only the current left-liberalism—which gives minority groups everything, and takes away from the majority group everything—would see anything objectionable in what I’ve just said.
Gintas writes:
If Jews are to conceive of themselves as their own nation (as Ezra would like), what would they think of being repatriated to Israel? They wouldn’t really miss America, would they? What’s to prefer in a foreign land over the traditional land of your people?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2008 12:10 AM | Send
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