“There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II”. So begins a recent opinion piece by Shelby Steele, entitled “White Guilt and the Western Past”, and subtitled “Why is America so delicate with the enemy?”
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A good, if rather loaded, question, and Steele, a historian and Hoover Institute fellow, is not a bad choice to attempt an answer. Let’s follow his argument for a bit.
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He starts by making an obvious point that virtually everyone overlooks: America could end the Iraq insurgency virtually in a heartbeat, if it had the resolve to do so. It doesn’t. “Despite our vast power,” he says, “we are only slogging along . . . in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one --including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war.” And that scale, he adds, is, by design, one of “minimalism and restraint”.
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Why?
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Gird your loins, my fellow pale-skinned Anglo-Saxon overlords, here it comes: what has hobbled the western world, particularly the U.S, in its conduct as a superpower, is “the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty”. Ah yes, the presumption of the supremacy of white skin, as sort of a shorthand for western culture. The presumption which built empires, transferred wealth on a massive scale, and consigned many men, women, and children of unfortunate hue to slavery, exploitation, and grim death, had, Steele writes, played itself out by the end of World War II. One third world revolution after another, he says, led to its utter defeat as an organizing principle:
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And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
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The effect of this cloud, Steele says, is restraint and circumspection, “because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not”:
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The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world.
.
A good, if rather loaded, question, and Steele, a historian and Hoover Institute fellow, is not a bad choice to attempt an answer. Let’s follow his argument for a bit.
.
He starts by making an obvious point that virtually everyone overlooks: America could end the Iraq insurgency virtually in a heartbeat, if it had the resolve to do so. It doesn’t. “Despite our vast power,” he says, “we are only slogging along . . . in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one --including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war.” And that scale, he adds, is, by design, one of “minimalism and restraint”.
.
Why?
.
Gird your loins, my fellow pale-skinned Anglo-Saxon overlords, here it comes: what has hobbled the western world, particularly the U.S, in its conduct as a superpower, is “the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty”. Ah yes, the presumption of the supremacy of white skin, as sort of a shorthand for western culture. The presumption which built empires, transferred wealth on a massive scale, and consigned many men, women, and children of unfortunate hue to slavery, exploitation, and grim death, had, Steele writes, played itself out by the end of World War II. One third world revolution after another, he says, led to its utter defeat as an organizing principle:
.
And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
.
The effect of this cloud, Steele says, is restraint and circumspection, “because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not”:
.
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world.
.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar? I am not seeking to validate a more brutal application of power in the Middle East – such advice might well come from an exasperated Caesar, and perhaps be directed toward a pusillanimous underling such as Pontius Pilate. But I would suggest that there is a ghostly analogy between Steele’s analysis of America’s behavior as a nation in the aftermath of Vietnam, and the behavior of many leaders of the Catholic Church over roughly the same period. For the Church, that behavior has been minimalistic, both in terms of governance, and in terms of proclamation of the faith. Over the past forty years, Catholics have witnessed a frenzy of watering down and smoothing over. The liturgical and sacramental life of the Church has been so “nuanced” – in favor of ecumenical and communal affectations, and at the expense of the personal and the plain statement of truths of faith – that millions of poorly catechized Catholics sleepwalk through life believing that their Church, and the glitzy Church of the Rousing Performance around the block, are essentially interchangeable.
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Is such behavior in large part a matter of guilt? Well, it depends. Guilt is one more concept that has undergone extensive renovation. Catholics, after all, are almost unique among modern day Christians in their recognition of individual guilt – the guilt born of original and actual sin. Outside the Church, and to some extent perhaps even within, guilt is often considered to be an institutional phenomenon – Halliburton behaves sinfully, or Exxon, or the IRS. But individuals, unless they are CEOs (or popes), are usually innocent victims. Because individuals are considered to be powerless in the twin grips of voracious, irresistible inner appetites on the one hand, and voracious, irresistible institutional powers on the other, they cannot be considered self-directed. They cannot, in other words, choose to do good and avoid evil, or vice versa. Viewed with scientific dispassion, they are rather like microbes, bacteria, or slime molds, reacting blindly to the prodding of their environment. Viewed with misbegotten compassion, they are children.
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To be sure, the Catholic Church has not banished concepts of sin, guilt, and individual responsibility. But is it too much to say that the approach to catechesis and pastoral oversight on the part of a significant number of bishops and priests has become infantilized, in the sense that they do not presume to minister to individuals accountable for their own moral decisions, so much as to children, or child-like adults, who ought not to be held responsible, who cannot be expected to understand, who need to be indulged, whose impulses ought never to be curbed, and whose delicate feelings must never, never be hurt? Is the intractability of our leaders’ predecessors on these issues now considered a matter for which expiation is required? Is their unwillingness to bend dogma and curtail centuries of tradition to suit the assumed needs and reflect the supposed preferences of modern man-children something about which our current leaders ought to feel guilty?
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Is the Catholic Church guilty of being the Catholic Church? Would suitable expiation be the recasting of it as a day-care center?
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Let there be no doubt, there is much for us all to feel guilty about. For the actions of our sexually aberrant priests, for example, and especially for their coddling by bishops (sometimes sexually aberrant themselves), there is no escaping of responsibility. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Church has many enemies, and that the guilt smear described by Shelby Steele in the context of international politics has also been used as a tactic against the Church, sometimes with devastating effect. The litany of real and supposed transgressions by the Church never seems to go away, no matter how many apologies, expressions of regret, and unilateral assumptions of responsibility are heaped on the altar of political correctness by popes and bishops. It is always what the Church did to Jews, what the Church did to Muslims, what the Church did to Galileo, what the Inquisition did to putative billions, what Cortez did to Aztecs, what Pius IX did to modernist ideologues, what Pius XII didn’t do, etc, etc. Forget the fact that many of these real and perceived injustices are actions of individuals rather than of the Church as an institution – the Church, it is felt by many, must assume the burden of guilt for all of them, and many more besides.
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It sometimes seems that, even for many inside the Church, a leaf may not fall silently to earth, but that the Church instituted by Jesus Christ is obligated to profess guilt over it.
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“Today, “ Shelby Steele writes, “words like ‘power’ and ‘victory’ are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them”:
.
For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
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One might say the same thing of words like sacrifice, redemption, transubstantiation, confession, repentance, concupiscence, and justice, to reel off a few (let’s not forget Latin). And, in the greatest of all battles, that of good against evil, where the prize is not gold or oil but the souls of men, how can minimalistic tolerance be an acceptable substitute for victory? “White guilt,” Steele says, in reference to America, “is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past.” Catholic guilt, in part the impetus to the current kinder, gentler, more indulgent “engagement” with an increasingly hostile and materialistic culture, is no less “a vacuum of moral authority”.
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Let the dead bury the dead.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar? I am not seeking to validate a more brutal application of power in the Middle East – such advice might well come from an exasperated Caesar, and perhaps be directed toward a pusillanimous underling such as Pontius Pilate. But I would suggest that there is a ghostly analogy between Steele’s analysis of America’s behavior as a nation in the aftermath of Vietnam, and the behavior of many leaders of the Catholic Church over roughly the same period. For the Church, that behavior has been minimalistic, both in terms of governance, and in terms of proclamation of the faith. Over the past forty years, Catholics have witnessed a frenzy of watering down and smoothing over. The liturgical and sacramental life of the Church has been so “nuanced” – in favor of ecumenical and communal affectations, and at the expense of the personal and the plain statement of truths of faith – that millions of poorly catechized Catholics sleepwalk through life believing that their Church, and the glitzy Church of the Rousing Performance around the block, are essentially interchangeable.
.
Is such behavior in large part a matter of guilt? Well, it depends. Guilt is one more concept that has undergone extensive renovation. Catholics, after all, are almost unique among modern day Christians in their recognition of individual guilt – the guilt born of original and actual sin. Outside the Church, and to some extent perhaps even within, guilt is often considered to be an institutional phenomenon – Halliburton behaves sinfully, or Exxon, or the IRS. But individuals, unless they are CEOs (or popes), are usually innocent victims. Because individuals are considered to be powerless in the twin grips of voracious, irresistible inner appetites on the one hand, and voracious, irresistible institutional powers on the other, they cannot be considered self-directed. They cannot, in other words, choose to do good and avoid evil, or vice versa. Viewed with scientific dispassion, they are rather like microbes, bacteria, or slime molds, reacting blindly to the prodding of their environment. Viewed with misbegotten compassion, they are children.
.
To be sure, the Catholic Church has not banished concepts of sin, guilt, and individual responsibility. But is it too much to say that the approach to catechesis and pastoral oversight on the part of a significant number of bishops and priests has become infantilized, in the sense that they do not presume to minister to individuals accountable for their own moral decisions, so much as to children, or child-like adults, who ought not to be held responsible, who cannot be expected to understand, who need to be indulged, whose impulses ought never to be curbed, and whose delicate feelings must never, never be hurt? Is the intractability of our leaders’ predecessors on these issues now considered a matter for which expiation is required? Is their unwillingness to bend dogma and curtail centuries of tradition to suit the assumed needs and reflect the supposed preferences of modern man-children something about which our current leaders ought to feel guilty?
.
Is the Catholic Church guilty of being the Catholic Church? Would suitable expiation be the recasting of it as a day-care center?
.
Let there be no doubt, there is much for us all to feel guilty about. For the actions of our sexually aberrant priests, for example, and especially for their coddling by bishops (sometimes sexually aberrant themselves), there is no escaping of responsibility. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Church has many enemies, and that the guilt smear described by Shelby Steele in the context of international politics has also been used as a tactic against the Church, sometimes with devastating effect. The litany of real and supposed transgressions by the Church never seems to go away, no matter how many apologies, expressions of regret, and unilateral assumptions of responsibility are heaped on the altar of political correctness by popes and bishops. It is always what the Church did to Jews, what the Church did to Muslims, what the Church did to Galileo, what the Inquisition did to putative billions, what Cortez did to Aztecs, what Pius IX did to modernist ideologues, what Pius XII didn’t do, etc, etc. Forget the fact that many of these real and perceived injustices are actions of individuals rather than of the Church as an institution – the Church, it is felt by many, must assume the burden of guilt for all of them, and many more besides.
.
It sometimes seems that, even for many inside the Church, a leaf may not fall silently to earth, but that the Church instituted by Jesus Christ is obligated to profess guilt over it.
.
“Today, “ Shelby Steele writes, “words like ‘power’ and ‘victory’ are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them”:
.
For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
.
One might say the same thing of words like sacrifice, redemption, transubstantiation, confession, repentance, concupiscence, and justice, to reel off a few (let’s not forget Latin). And, in the greatest of all battles, that of good against evil, where the prize is not gold or oil but the souls of men, how can minimalistic tolerance be an acceptable substitute for victory? “White guilt,” Steele says, in reference to America, “is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past.” Catholic guilt, in part the impetus to the current kinder, gentler, more indulgent “engagement” with an increasingly hostile and materialistic culture, is no less “a vacuum of moral authority”.
.
Let the dead bury the dead.
