Conclusion

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Sacredness is unveiled through your own experience, and lives in you to the degree that you accept that experience as your teacher, mother, state, church, even, or perhaps particularly, if it comes into conflict with the abstract received wisdom that power always tries to convince you to live by. One of power’s unconscious functions is to rob you of your own experience by saying: we know better, whatever you may have seen or heard, whatever cockeyed story you come up with; we are principle, and if experience contradicts us, why then you must be guilty of something. Power—whether church, school, state, or family—usually does this at first in a charming way while feeding you chocolate cake, bread and wine, advanced degrees, tax shelters, grant programs, and a strong national defense. Only when contradicted does it show its true face, and try to kill you. Instead, kill it inside you fast, and do it whatever damage seems practical in the outer world. Next, put your arms around everything that has ever happened to you, and give it an affectionate squeeze.

—Bill Holm, The Music of Failure

DEMOCRACY AND MODERN EVILS

Eminent writers have recently been inviting us to choose sides on the modern age, as if they knew the essence of modernity and whether, on the whole, it has been a good or a bad thing. The ones who say that modernity has mainly been a good thing tend to think of democracy as its essence. The ones who imply, at least in their tone and their selection of examples, that modernity has mainly been a bad thing tend to see talk of democracy as a sort of smoke screen, designed to draw attention away from modern evils. Both sides tend to describe modernity as an essential underlying structure. They differ over what that structure is and how democracy relates to it. The temptation seems strong to find something in particular that stands for modernity itself, some set of necessary and sufficient conditions the absence of which would make a form of life pre- or postmodern, some basic trait or structural feature in terms of which modernity can be judged.

Beginning in this way tends to block the path of moral inquiry and social criticism. It does so by narrowing one’s focus too quickly, reducing one’s ability to recognize complexity and ambiguity or to experience moral ambivalence. Disbelieving in essences gives no certain protection against this habit of thought. If you doubt this, consider the antiessentialist who commits himself to the doctrine that modern thought, the history of philosophy from Plato to Hegel, or perhaps even the “Western project” itself, is (in essence) the history of essentialism or the metaphysics of presence. In one breath he tells us that there are no essences; in the next he describes an entire age or epoch as if it had one. And from what point of view does the postmodern oracle speak? At times he claims to speak from the perspective of the emerging future, the character of which he cannot specify; at others he seems to hover in midair above the epoch he describes. He is prepared to think through any position but his own. When pressed he merely repeats the hard sayings of his postmodernist masters. Delineating an alternative to the system of the now-vanishing present, he says, is mere complicity in that system, so he must excuse himself from defending a “position.” Yet his descriptions of the age are obviously saturated with moral outrage.

His opposite number typically responds, first, by pointing out the implicit contradiction, and second, by defending everything his postmodernist opponent wishes to destroy or deconstruct. He claims to understand and represent what makes Western culture or the modern period worth caring about, and that, for him, is the whole story. On what basis can he defend the achievements of an entire age or culture? It would be viciously circular, he thinks, to appeal to parochial values in defending his conclusions. So he goes transcendental. He feels he must rise above the age and look down upon us, judging us from afar. Like his opponent, he has trouble explaining the point of view he claims to occupy.

When writers set out to instruct us about the essence or deep structure of modernity, and we take their claims at face value, at most one writer or school of writers can be correct. But suppose we take them—against their stated wishes, if necessary—to be saying simply that the so-called essence or deep structure is something about modernity worth studying in detail. Then we can go on to ask how a detailed description of that might be integrated into our understanding of other things within the same temporal field. Mere comprehensiveness of detail, of course, would be debilitating if taken as an end in itself. There are too many details to assimilate and more coming in all of the time. Do we not, then, need to be told which are essential? Yes we do, but here the word essential does not mean “of or pertaining to an essence.” It means “the sort of thing you need to know about, given acceptable ends and concerns.” Many things can be essential in this pragmatic sense. The distinction that matters is not the one between essences and accidents or that between deep structures and the phenomena to which they give rise, but rather the distinction between the trivial and what is worth caring about.

Needless to say, drawing the distinction between triviality and significance in a study of modern democratic culture is in part a moral and political task, and it can generate heated controversy. Not everybody writing about modernity shares the same ends or concerns. When a writer says that some X is essential to our understanding of modernity, it is wise to ask: relative to what ends? What concerns make sense of this writer’s descriptions and evaluations, and what reason might we have for sharing those concerns or rejecting them? It would not be worth asking our descriptive questions about modernity unless something were at stake, something about the modern age that makes us want to bury it or resurrect it, to condemn it or mourn its passing. If we knew what was at stake, we might know which details were essential in the relevant sense.

In this book, modern democratic practices and ideals are the objects of my concern. I have been spending many pages trying to understand them. But I am not claiming that democracy is the essence of modernity. Nor am I claiming that the social practices in which democratic ideals are embedded live up to those ideals themselves. Far from it. The so-called democratic societies—though often preferable, on the whole, to their predecessors and competitors—are in fact severely deficient when judged from the perspective implied by their own best thinking. So my ambivalence is not only directed toward modernity, conceived as an epoch that includes much else besides democracy, but also toward modern democracies, understood as societies officially yet imperfectly committed to democratic ideals.

Assuming, as I do, that democratic individuality is a good thing, not to be confused with atomistic dissolution of social life, does not mean that it compensates for the evils of alienation and exploitation, still less for the horrors of racism, slavery, and mass death. “The evil cannot be willed or wanted or philosophically tolerated, whatever good it may lead to unintentionally,” as George Kateb rightly says.¹ We can praise the genuine achievements of modernity, according to Kateb, “and still believe that no amount of greatness can weigh as much, or outweigh, the horrors. There is no commensurability, no wish to strike a balance. The horror of totalitarianism is unforgivable: incommensurate with other evils and with all greatness. Still, there is a life, a life in modernity. Political theory must try to take it in, in its vast indefiniteness” (Hannah Arendt, 170). Not only political theory, I would add, but critical thought in general.

Postmodernism is apocalyptic in tone. It prepares the way for something radically new—something, utterly beyond modernity, which has heretofore appeared, if at all, only at the margins or in the fissures of official Western culture. Traditionalism, on the contrary, tends toward nostalgia. It is trying to find its way back to premodern traditions in the hope of reconstructing and defending them anew. The difference between the two is often summed up in a question like the one MacIntyre poses halfway through After Virtue: “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” It is as if our troubled journey beyond modernity had finally brought us all, after much strife and destruction, to the same crossroad, where we must turn either right or left, certain only that modernity itself lies in ruin behind us.

But there is something wrong with this picture, and not merely with its stark and misleading disjunction. There can be little doubt that many influential modern thinkers have attempted to escape history and tradition. Elsewhere I have tried to contribute to the historiography of their effort and to the diagnosis of their failures. Yet I see no good reason to suppose that modernity, even as we know it in the West, is the expression of a single project, the career of a single ambition. There is more to modernity than that. There is a life, a complicated network of practices and institutions and goods and evils to be taken in.

Declaring modern democratic aspiration a good thing need not lessen our capacity to recognize modern evils: alienation, racism, anti-Semitism, the horrors of mass death, the prospect of nuclear war, the suffering of the poor, the subjugation of women, the banality of political discourse, and so on. It does, however, make the now-familiar reductive slogans of our social critics seem irresponsibly one-sided: that modernity is simply the Enlightenment project in collapse; an enterprise of logocentric self-deception, the death of authentic political action, the triumph of instrumental reason; or “nothing more than discipline concealed.”² There is truth in each of these slogans. They are not, however, the whole truth, and if they were nothing but the truth, we would all be too far gone to know it. Yet in making this point one can easily appear to be implying that we should disregard our misgivings about modern evils.

George Orwell, in a commentary on the “twilight-of-the-gods” mentality expressed in “Sweeney Agonistes,” remarked sardonically that T. S. Eliot had achieved “the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.”³ By now our critics have practiced Eliot’s difficult feat so many times and with such zeal that they have made it look easy. Any graduate student can perform it at a moment’s notice. More demanding and more worthy of respect is the kind of ambivalence Orwell worked into the crack about Eliot. It can be found throughout much of his best social criticism—sometimes directed toward features of his own society, at others toward features of British socialism. Few writers can hold together contempt for and appreciation of different aspects of a single object so successfully. I think especially of his various commentaries on mass culture. Orwell can sound like Adorno when he talks about tinned food or the decadence of a life dominated by machines, but he can also make us see an ordinary bourgeois paperweight or a cup of properly brewed tea as a fitting object of love. How many writers could work all of this, and much more, into a picture of our culture without seeming insincere or hopelessly incoherent?

More common is the rhetoric of half-hearted concession, in which one first concedes the truth of a proposition, utters the word “but” emphatically, and then immediately introduces another proposition designed to drain away the force of the first. When we hear certain intellectuals say that blacks have been terribly mistreated but …, we know what to expect next and are right to suspect an urge to excuse inaction in the face of injustice. Nothing could be further from the sort of ambivalence I propose. Not everyone will look kindly on my ambivalent praise of democracy. But then some people, as Orwell once said, think “half a loaf is the same as no bread.”⁴

If we decide to use democratic ideals to help us get critical leverage on some of the bad and horrific things around us, we will be using concepts our own age makes available to us to criticize it. We are, I believe, entitled to these concepts, and the early champions of modern democracy were rationally justified in introducing them. But it is self-deceptive to imagine, as they often did, that democratic norms are free-floating products of pure reason, wholly independent of tradition. Like all norms, ours are embedded in contingent, fallible social practices. The sad truth is that these practices have themselves often been used to buttress unjust institutions, turned to bad ends, and defended by horrific means.

Emerson once remarked wisely on our incompetence “to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition.” The question of the times finally resolves “itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?”⁵ Even when phrased in the first person singular, the practical question has a political dimension, because each of us bears some responsibility for the condition of society and the arrangements that govern it. The question is not whether ours is an age we would prefer, all things considered, into which to be born. None of us has a choice in that. So our question had better be how to live here and now, under the circumstances in which we actually find ourselves.

THREE CONSTITUENCIES

In a passage worth quoting at length, the historian David Hollinger has distinguished three “formidable constituencies” that are currently contending for control of the American state:

One is a business elite that, in an age of international corporations, finds more and more of its employees and factories abroad. This elite has some need for the American state, but it can get along without attending very carefully to the needs of the nation, the people who constitute the community of American citizens. The second constituency identifies with one or more diasporas and sees the United States more as a site for transnational affiliations than as an affiliation of its own. The proponents of diasporic consciousness sometimes look to the state for entitlements, but, like the business elite, they have little incentive to devote themselves to the welfare of the [civic] national community. In the meantime, a third constituency has claimed America with a vengeance. This third constituency is made up of a great variety of Middle Americans, evangelical Christians, advocates of family values, and supporters of Newt Gingrich and of Rush Limbaugh. Many of these Americans are suspicious of the state except as an enforcer of personal morality, but they claim the nation as, in effect, their own ethnic group.⁶

It takes only a little reflection to realize that none of these already-mobilized constituencies is currently behaving in accordance with a substantively democratic conception of justice. To some significant degree, they all lack the virtue of justice as democrats define it. The business elite is busy hoarding wealth, depressing tax rates, exploiting foreign workers, breaking unions, dismantling arrangements that offer hope to the poor and the insane, and preventing reform of the electoral process. The cultural Right—not to be confused with Middle America as such—reinforces sexist hierarchy in the family while struggling in other social arenas to maintain privileged status for men, whites, and conservative Christians. Some leaders of the diasporic communities have used the ideology of multiculturalism to secure entitlements from the state, but they often actively discourage the broader identifications that would allow effective democratic coalitions to come together.

Associated with the three constituencies we have a set of stock characters: the jet-setting executive, the Bible-thumping evangelical, and members-in-good-standing of the cult of ethnicity in all of its forms. Those who play the roles can purchase the requisite uniforms, gear, and preferred sources of infotainment from multinational corporations, which have discovered how to fill their coffers by multiplying and merchandising identities. But be warned; anyone who buys in is agreeing to conform to a type. The process of conscription starts early. The main choice that many young people think they face today is which type in a standard menu of types to conform to. This choice first presents itself to children in schoolyard options like jock, nerd, babe, Goth, straight edge, homeboy, and skateboarder—each with its own costly emblems and accoutrements. Boys can be like their favorite sports hero, girls can be like their favorite pop star, if only they fork over the cash. But none of these options provides a means of escaping an essentially docile role in one of the three main adult constituencies unless the activities and role models they involve happen to awaken a desire for excellence and self-cultivation—for individuality.

Democracy will face unpromising odds at the national level so long as the three entrenched constituencies jointly control the political landscape and behave as they have been behaving. Its ideals can achieve political expression only when people learn to think of themselves as individuals while identifying with a broader ethical inheritance and political community. On the issue of democratic individuality I stand with Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and against the communitarians and traditionalists who have cast aspersions on this ideal. Theorists have given individuality a bad name by misconstruing it as essentially atomistic and possessive. The democratic ideal of individuality is not a fiction of complete independence from influence.⁷ It is a set of interlocking virtues—including courage and self-trust—that are required to resist conformity to socially mandated types. The only way to acquire such virtues is to participate in social practices of a kind that direct one’s attention to intrinsically valuable goods and away from goods that can be selfishly pursued and hoarded. In our circumstances, as in most others, all social practices directed toward excellence—including crafts, arts, sciences, and sports—are threatened by greed and docility. If we fail to protect such practices and the modes of identity-formation, self-transcendence, and reason-exchange they sustain, it is foolhardy to expect concerted democratic action to remain possible for long. A nation of selfish conformists—entirely uncommitted to the self-enlarging, other-regarding, excellence-oriented demands of individuality—would be a nation inherently incapable of citizenship.

The social practices that matter most directly to democracy, as I have argued at length, are the discursive practices of ethical deliberation and political debate. The discursive exchange essential to democracy is likely to thrive only where individuals identify to some significant extent with a community of reason-givers.⁸ At the local level, this may be the community constituted by arguments over who does the dishes, what to do with the garbage we produce, how the police are behaving, and what should be covered in a high school curriculum. But at the national level it must be the people as a whole, attending to the concerns and well-being of the people as a whole. The phrase “as a whole” here is not intended to reify the people into something that will itself become the object of mystical attachment or awe. It is meant simply to rule out implicit definition of the people in terms of a constituency. In the present context, this means at a minimum the avoidance of implicitly ethnic or racial specifications of who the people really are. Yet an implicitly racist usurpation of the concept of the people is only one obstacle to the creation of a democratic politics. Another is an inability or unwillingness—on the part of diasporic communities, workers, the poor, and others who would benefit most directly from democratic social change—to identify with any group larger than their own faction. It is by no means clear how the friends of democracy can overcome this obstacle, especially in the face of the business elite’s strategies for reinforcing ethnic identification through the merchandising of life-styles. It will be a formidable challenge, to say the least, and well worth our best efforts in the coming decades.

BEYOND SECULAR LIBERALISM AND THEOLOGICAL TRADITIONALISM

Hollinger’s three constituencies should be kept in mind when one evaluates the behavior of the intellectuals who have acquired positions of influence in our major institutions of higher education. The social-contract theorists have become a dominant force in law schools, ethics centers, and philosophy departments—thanks mainly to the intellectual and moral authority of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Rawls saw utilitarianism as his principal opponent in normative theory. But the ease with which his social-contract theory established itself as the philosophical position most worthy of serious attention had as much to do with the absence of strong competitors as it did with the theoretical ingenuity and argumentative power with which Rawls developed his position. In the decades immediately preceding the publication of Rawls’s masterwork, American normative philosophy had largely confined itself to something called metaethics, the second-order analysis of moral language (carried out for the most part without answering the first-order questions of how a person should live or a state should behave). So Rawls was stepping into a near-vacuum, and doing so at a moment when the students who had come of age during the controversies over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War were demanding that normative inquiry be given a central place in the curriculum. In the philosophy departments, the most important effect of Rawls’s work was simply that normative inquiry became a respectable philosophical specialty again. On the other hand, because it initially occupied the philosophical stage almost by itself and encouraged its audience to think of utilitarianism as its only worthy competitor, Rawlsian philosophy did not at first foster discussion of the full range of theoretical alternatives in social and political theory. And the extremely abstract nature of the discussion it has engendered has limited its impact on the behavior of Hollinger’s three constituencies.

The sons, daughters, and future members of the business elite who read A Theory of Justice in college or law school are at least confronted, if only momentarily, with serious reasons for supposing that their actions are constrained by fairness and by the rights of the least well-off. It is a very good thing for such people to spend a few weeks of their young adulthood imagining themselves behind “the veil of ignorance” in “the original position.” It is good for them and good for the rest of us that they have at least once had to ask themselves what sort of social ground rules they would select if they did not know they were about to occupy positions of power and wealth. But as Rawls gradually came to realize, the egalitarian arguments of A Theory of Justice were themselves expressions of a comprehensive view of life not widely shared by the general population—a view disparaged by the cultural right as secular liberalism.

For some time Rawls struggled, with only modest success, to reformulate his liberalism as a political doctrine designed to appeal to citizens holding various reasonable comprehensive views. The goal was to show that one need not be a Kantian liberal, like Rawls himself, to accept his reformulated theory as a basis for political order and social cooperation. It was a noble project, and Rawls deserves credit for the intellectual honesty as well as the patience and philosophical skill with which he pursued it. But for reasons hinted at in chapter 3, I doubt that the project can be made to work on its own terms. The sticking point, the issue that reveals the implausibility of his contractarian premises, is the question of what role religious reasons are permitted to play in political argument. On this issue Rawls started off with a doctrine that prohibited citizens from relying essentially on such reasons when deliberating on constitutional essentials and certain other basic matters. This allowed writers like Neuhaus and Hauerwas to portray him as the enemy of everything they stand for and as the symbol of secular liberalism’s triumph in the elite educational institutions. Rawls’s subsequent attempt to soften his stand on this issue brought it somewhat closer to the intuitions of the American public on the ethics of citizenship. But the concessions it made to those intuitions do not seem to emerge naturally from the contractarian premises with which Rawls began. Hence Rawls was left, at the end of the day, in an awkward stance. He was a secular liberal who realized, quite rightly, that secular liberalism could not successfully play the expressive role that it originally sought to play in American democratic politics. He hoped to modify social-contract theory into something distinct from secular liberalism as a comprehensive view of life. Yet the modifications, which incorporated a few lessons from Dewey and Hegel, seem finally to have gone against the grain of the theory’s premises.

Richard Rorty has performed a great service to American democracy by reviving interest in the tradition of Whitman and Dewey and by formulating an unambiguously expressivist account of philosophy’s role in the culture. Democratic and egalitarian ideals have had few more eloquent defenders in our period. Yet, like Rawls, Rorty tends to waver between a form of pluralism that in principle ought to welcome the expression of religious as well as secular outlooks in political contexts and a relatively aggressive form of secular liberalism that appears to exclude views unlike his own from public life. His style is livelier than Rawls’s and more accessible to people trained in neither philosophy nor legal theory. But in the many passages where Rorty seems to be emulating Nietzsche rather than Dewey as his model social critic, he becomes too naughty, too much the violator of what his fellow citizens recognize as common sense, to perform the expressive function he has limned in his best work. To the proponents of diasporic communities, he often seems too smug about the benefits of liberal society. To the cultural right, he is a symbol of the aestheticism and decadence to which secular liberalism leads.

A traditionalist like Hauerwas obviously has no desire to perform an expressively reflective function on behalf of democratic culture. He styles himself as an external critic of that culture, which he addresses as a “resident alien.” He speaks as a member of the “Christian colony” within liberal society.⁹ This has not, however, prevented him from being named “America’s Best Theologian” by an authority as dedicated to the status quo as Time magazine.¹⁰ One suspects that his antiliberal screed may be more comforting to the Christian members of Hollinger’s three constituencies than Hauerwas intends it to be. We are, after all, in an era when any self-described liberal stands little chance of getting elected to national office. If one wants to be prophetic in this time and place, why choose liberalism as one’s chief ideological target? The Republican Party and the Fox News Network tell American Christians on a daily basis that they are a beleaguered minority in an evil, liberal order. Why confront the fact of being a majority complicit in injustice if you can believe something like this?

Many of Hauerwas’s readers seem to have taken consolation from the idea that strengthening one’s identification with the church at the expense of identification with the nation is the most important step one can take toward membership in a community of true virtue. The leading political beneficiaries of Hauerwas’s revival of virtue ethics appear to have been not some latter-day Dorothy Day but Pope John Paul II and former Secretary of Education, William Bennett. Hauerwas has not seen fit to remind American Christians forcibly that, as a majority in a wealthy world power with a democratic constitution, they constantly display the character of their community in part by discharging their responsibilities as citizens well or poorly.

It is largely with Rawls, Rorty, and Hauerwas in mind that I have tried to develop an alternative public philosophy in this book. In the last several chapters, I have defended a type of pragmatism that appropriates the most promising features of Rorty’s work while steering clear of its philosophical and stylistic excesses. Throughout the book, I have tried to define an acceptable path between the liberalism of Rawls and Rorty, on the one hand, and the traditionalism of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, on the other.

In Rawlsian terminology, my position might be termed a sort of “modus vivendi” pluralism, for the public philosophy I propose does not insist on the need to ground political discussion in a set of rules no reasonable and rational citizen could reasonably reject. I am trying to articulate a form of pluralism, one that citizens with strong religious commitments can accept and that welcomes their full participation in public life without fudging on its own premises. But I see this pluralism primarily as an existing feature of the political culture, not as a philosophical doctrine needing to be imposed on it. Our political culture is already pluralistic in the relevant sense. What I have tried to supply is a philosophical statement of what this pluralism involves. It is a remarkably widespread and steady commitment, on the part of citizens, to talk things through with citizens unlike themselves. This commitment is there, prior to all theorizing, in the habits of the people. The burden of proof is on those who want to change it. Because it is an aspect of our substantive commitment to the ethical life of democracy, because it coheres with the widely (but not unanimously) held conviction that no merely human perspective has a monopoly on the truth, it seems inappropriate to think of it as a mere modus vivendi. It is not something we “settle for” in the absence of a real social contract or authentic communitarian unity.¹¹

To the members of Hollinger’s three constituencies this book serves primarily as a reminder that they are also members of a civic nation. It is a nation that needs their active help and concern if it is to endure as a people committed to democracy, let alone as a people capable of living up to democratic ideals. The terms “nation” and “people” here are synonyms, and are not to be confused with the nation-state, considered as a sprawling bureaucratic apparatus for conducting the business of government. Hauerwas is quite right to say that the call to sacrifice oneself for one’s country today sounds a lot “like being asked to die for the telephone company.”¹² But this is partly because we tend to confuse the civic nation—the people—with the nation-state. In this book, I have been encouraging identification with the civic nation, with the community of reason-givers constituted by the democratic practice of holding one another responsible. This implies no affection for the massive institutional configuration of the nation-state, of which we should always remain suspicious. The American nation-state has proven itself especially worthy of suspicion in recent decades. And as chapter 10 makes clear, identification with the civic nation implies no reluctance to construct discursive communities that transcend national boundaries. I am not recommending that we become preoccupied with our identities as members of a civic nation. In my view, this is merely one important concern among others. Indeed, a life lived solely or even largely as an expression of this concern would hold no attraction for me.

In part 2, I have sought to persuade seriously committed religious citizens, especially those members of the Christian majority who have half-acknowledged democratic commitments in their hearts, that identifying with the civic nation in a democratic republic like ours need not conflict with their theological convictions. First, I argued against the notion that Rawlsian liberalism offers a descriptively adequate account of our political culture. One can reject the liberal theory without rejecting the culture. Second, I offered an account of the benign sense in which our political discourse is secularized. Hence, one can participate in it wholeheartedly without implicitly discounting one’s theological convictions. Third, I offered a good deal of immanent criticism of the new traditionalism, with the aim of showing that its case for rejecting modern democratic societies is deeply flawed, even on its own terms. I have not denied that some coherent theological outlooks are at odds with democracy. This goes without saying. Theocratic theologies are plainly inconsistent with democracy, as are radical forms of separatism that depict participation in any religiously plural society as essentially vicious or sinful. But one of the most important findings presented here is that Christian theological orthodoxy is not the source of the new traditionalism’s antidemocratic sentiments or tendencies. Robert Merrihew Adams, Karl Barth, George Hunsinger, and Nicholas Wolterstorff are all orthodox Trinitarians who have played prominent parts in these pages; each of them takes an attitude toward the world outside the church that exhibits a commendable commitment to democracy. The politically worrisome aspects of the new traditionalism derive from sources quite distinct from any doctrine shared by the major varieties of Trinitarian theology. At a moment when orthodox Judaism in Israel and orthodox Islam around the world are struggling to sort through analogous issues, study of Christian thinkers who have connected theological orthodoxy with democratic practice is an academic topic of global significance. It would be a good thing if the relevant parts of Barth’s Church Dogmatics came to hold a prominent place in the seminary curricula of all the desert faiths. So much the better if voices seeking to democratize religious institutions were heard there as well.

Democracy involves substantive normative commitments, but does not presume to settle in advance the ranking of our highest values. Nor does it claim to save humanity from sin and death. It takes for granted that reasonable people will differ in their conceptions of piety, in their grounds for hope, in their ultimate concerns, and in their speculations about salvation. Yet it holds that people who differ on such matters can still exchange reasons with one another intelligibly, cooperate in crafting political arrangements that promote justice and decency in their relations with one another, and do both of these things without compromising their integrity. Cooperating democratic citizens tend also to be individuals who care about matters higher than politics, and expect not to get their way on each issue that comes before the public for deliberation. It must be said, however, that there are times when anyone with a conscience will be hard-pressed to say why one ought to identify with a nation willing to adopt a policy inconsistent with what seems patently right and true. For me, our use of capital punishment and our excessive use of military force are among the issues that make me wonder whether paying taxes to the state is a form of complicity from which I ought to extricate myself, regardless of the cost. For many others, abortion raises similar doubts. But even if I were to refuse paying my taxes, thus following Thoreau’s noble example, I would intend the gesture as an act of communication, as a signal to other members of my community that I intend to hold them responsible for their injustices. So long as I am thinking along those lines, I am still identifying with that community, even as I express my alienation from it. This sort of ambivalent membership has a notable lineage in democratic culture.

It is worth keeping in mind that similar issues arise concerning one’s membership in any sizable group, not least of all a religious one. The Christian churches are now torn on numerous doctrinal, practical, and institutional issues, including many of the same issues that divide the rest of us politically. Many Christians have faced hard decisions over whether they could continue in good conscience to remain members in good standing of a group that, say, bans women from the priesthood or permits same-sex couples to marry. It is easy to see how these issues can come to have such a strong bearing on the question of continued identification with the group. But this should remind us that no social body, including the church, provides immunity from the dilemmas and conflicts of membership. Retreating from identification with the American people while intensifying one’s identification with the people of God leaves a Christian with roughly the same dilemmas, the same ambivalence, with which he or she started. The only alternative is full-fledged separatism, which involves commitment to a group that is small enough and uniform enough to eliminate ambivalence altogether, at least for a while. But why would I want to confine my discursive community to the people who already agree with me on all essential matters? Isn’t part of the point of trying to hold one another responsible discursively that we do not agree on everything and therefore need to talk things through?

Secular liberals, sensing the demise of the religious Left, might want to argue that the only way to save our democracy from the religious Right is to inhibit the expression of religious reasons in the public square. Aside from whatever theoretical errors might lie behind this argument, it is foolhardy to suppose that anything like the Rawlsian program of restraint or what Rorty calls the Jeffersonian compromise will succeed in a country with our religious and political history. So the practical question is not whether religious reasons will be expressed in public settings, but by whom, in what manner, and to what ends. Secular liberals underestimate the role they themselves have played in shifting the balance between the religious Left and the religious Right in American politics. The rise of the religious Right is in some measure a backlash against the perceived dominance of secular liberalism over certain important institutions and professions. In the 1960s, Neuhaus and MacIntyre were prominent figures on the Left, and Hauerwas was a young Niebuhrian liberal. Secular liberalism has unwittingly fostered the decline of the religious Left by persuading religious intellectuals that liberal society is intent on excluding the expression of their most strongly felt convictions. The new traditionalism portrays the religious Left as a mutation of secular liberalism that is infecting the churches like a deadly virus.

This picture gets all of the relevant historical patterns wrong. The first modern revolutionaries were not secular liberals; they were radical Calvinists. Among the most important democratic movements in American history were Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement; both of these were based largely in the religious communities. Religious colleges and seminaries provided strong support for both movements. If religious premises had not been adduced in support of them, it is unlikely that either movement would have resulted in success. The Christian majority needed to be persuaded in both cases that commitment to scriptural authority was at least compatible with the reform being proposed. If the religious Left does not soon recover its energy and self-confidence, it is unlikely that American democracy will be capable of counteracting either the greed of its business elite or the determination of many whites to define the authentic nation in ethnic, racial, or ecclesiastical terms.

COMMUNITY

In my town an institution that calls itself a medical center—my neighbors and I call it a hospital—has gone to court, hoping to gain an exception to zoning regulations so that a block of residential housing can be converted to bureaucratic offices. The community is fighting back, fighting for its life as a community, and searching for words and reasons to use in making its case. It is a collection of little neighborhoods, all within a ten-minute walk from a meeting ground known as Community Park. Closest to the hospital lies a mainly Italian neighborhood, founded by skilled stone carvers who came here many decades back, when the university that employs me chose to build Gothic buildings that ape the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge. The house my wife and I lived in as newlyweds in our early twenties was in the Italian section, and then overlooked the entrance to the emergency room. That house and the garden behind it, which our landlord used to raise vegetables and rabbits, have long since given way to a parking garage. To one side is our neighborhood, mostly Anglo and professional. To the other is a lower-class neighborhood for many years populated only by blacks and now home also to many immigrants arriving from Latin America.

In what sense do these neighborhoods, which I have just defined in terms of ethnicity and class, constitute a community? A community is a group that holds something in common.¹³ What, then, do the people living in these little neighborhoods hold in common, besides a geographical space I could arbitrarily define? Communitarians refer to communities as constituted by common ends, common ethnic roots, and common narratives. By communitarian standards, I suppose my interlocking neighborhoods are not a community at all. Perhaps the Italian neighborhood, taken by itself, might come close to qualifying, but not all three neighborhoods, taken together. Many social critics would probably say that what I call my community is in fact nothing but a collection of atomistic individuals. According to such critics, if my neighbors and I imagine that we are fighting for the existence of our community, we must really be fighting for our rights or self-interest as property holders and renters. And if the hospital has rights and interests, too, and now owns the property in the block it has gradually bought out, our dispute is just a clash of conflicting wills.

Participating in the ethical life of this place while reflecting on the issues treated in this book has led me to see my community differently—to see it as a community, but not in the communitarian sense. One way of viewing this book is as an answer to the question of what my neighbors and I hold in common. We share activities. For example, we play basketball, baseball, and soccer in one another’s company. Sometimes we play next to one another in games that do not cross ethnic or racial lines. Sometimes we play against one another on teams that represent our differences. And sometimes we play with one another on teams that mix things up. Soccer has done a good deal to bring us together, because it was brought here initially by the Italians, and Anglo and black children began playing it at about the same time the Latin Americans began to arrive. On one banner day, the latter group appeared en masse, faces painted in school colors, to cheer on the high school girls in a state tournament game. On another important day, not long after Latinos began to join a soccer club founded back in the 1970s by suburban whites, a boys team called the Latin Power offered membership to a handful of Anglos. Not long thereafter, the high school boys won the state championship with a team that included Latino, African-American, Anglo, and Asian members.

We all understood what community those teams represented. Now, I don’t mean to idealize that community. Racism and ethnic animosity flare up among us on a regular basis. The Guatemalan who organized and later integrated the Latin Power, and who has probably done more for our children than any other individual, was once beaten to a pulp for holding his ground on one of the basketball courts at Community Park. He has also been exploited and mistreated in many other ways by upper-middle-class whites pretending to be his friends. Three years after the state championship, the tensions between Latinos and Anglos at the high school had grown significantly. There is a local politics of ethnic identity, and it is not always pleasant or uplifting. There are also fathers among us who beat their wives and children. Many of my neighbors lack medical insurance, fear the police, and notice their incomes shrinking. Some of our children use drugs or commit suicide.

In the midst of all this, what we hold in common, what we have going for us as a community, are valued social practices and the forms of excellence they involve. We care about soccer, about how the pizzas and tortillas are made, and about having our voices heard in town hall. We want to hold each other responsible for commitments and actions, so we talk about them. We debate the merits of center forwards, anchovies, and school board candidates. Those of us who have voted at least once have begun to feel that we need not quake or bow in the presence of school superintendents, hospital executives, or other members of the professional class. Because of all of this, we are able to sense personally and say publicly what the hospital threatens to take away from us if it clumsily destroys the Italian neighborhood that links our little community together. And we are beginning to realize that if we fail to behave as if we identify with our community, a large corporation in our midst will have its way, and we will lose something we care about.

It would be foolish to think that this level of political interaction encompasses the whole of politics, but it should count for something. A correspondent in Sweden tells me that the notion of a national community as a group that holds activities in common has influenced governmental policy there on the funding of projects designed to overcome ethnic divisions resulting from a recent wave of immigration. What a commitment to democratic culture implies, so he tells me, is that governments at all levels had better make it their business to foster common activities if civil society and identification with the community as a whole are to survive the increasing awareness of ethnicity and race. No doubt, there is much to be done to fine-tune our understanding of how to provide effective support for civil society, but we already know enough, it seems to me, to experiment boldly and prudently with this end in view.

A recent book by Cornel West and Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets the need for such experimentation within a broader vision of political and economic reform.¹⁴ One can debate the details of its proposals, but if we are to achieve anything like the reforms West and Unger advocate, it seems to me that great urgency attaches to the general project of cultivating identifications that transcend ethnicity, race, and religion—at the local and national levels. It is becoming obvious to the members of my local community that if we do not behave as a group that holds valued practices in common, including the discursive practice of holding one another responsible, we will lose something we care about. To survive as a community, we need to identify with the group we constitute and behave accordingly. Must an analogous practical inference remain beyond the reach of the civic nation? Only, I think, if our muckrakers, novelists, poets, essayists, filmmakers, painters, singers, and professors fail to nourish the public’s imagination in the right way.

There are, of course, several reasons that they might fail. The first and most obvious of these is that they might not try. They might keep themselves busy doing something else that does not advance the cause of democracy. This could be something narrowly aesthetic or academic that does not make much connection with the cause of democracy at all. Or it could be something that is meant to advance the cause of democracy but is actually misconceived and counterproductive, like the Rawlsian position on the public expression of religious reasons. Still worse, it could be something likely to weaken commitment to democracy in the public at large, like the traditionalist program of Hauerwas and MacIntyre. This book expresses my concern that the current dominance of social-contract theory in law schools, philosophy departments, and ethics centers and the rising influence of the new traditionalism in seminaries and divinity schools are mutually reinforcing tendencies in American intellectual life that spell trouble for American democracy. And I have hinted that the postmodernists in our literature departments have not made things much better. The main audience I hope to address is a younger generation of intellectuals now in the process of deciding how to define its vocation, its task. They can use a reminder, I suspect, of their own half-conscious commitment to a form of free expression and exchange of reasons that is not adequately accounted for in Rawlsian, traditionalist, or postmodernist terms.

But even if highly gifted intellectuals choose to embrace a vocation of improving the prospects of democratic community, there is no guarantee that things will go well. It would be a grave mistake, for example, if they came to believe that a nation like ours could become a community in the communitarian sense. No nation the size and complexity of ours can realistically imagine itself as a group bound together by agreement on a ranking of its highest values, a religious vision of the good, or a big story about the origins and destiny of a people. This would be an unrealistic self-image even for the collection neighborhoods around Community Park. And it would quickly become dangerous if pursued through legislation that either inhibited the free expression of religious belief or effectively established one set of religious commitments as the presuppositions everyone is expected to take for granted when exchanging reasons with their peers.

The kind of community that democrats should be promoting at the local, state, and national levels of politics is the kind that involves shared commitment to the Constitution and the culture of democracy. In America, this culture consists of a loose and ever-changing collection of social practices that includes such activities as quilting, baseball, and jazz. But its central and definitive component is the discursive practice of holding one another responsible for the actions we commit, the commitments we undertake, and the sorts of people we become. The expressive vocation of a democratic intellectual involves identifying with the community constituted by this practice, attempting to make its various features explicit, and subjecting those features to critical scrutiny and revision.

Hegel worried that intellectuals in his own day were responding in essentially debilitating ways to the social situation in which they found themselves. Among the types he had in mind were the Kantian formalist who estranged himself from that situation by trying to rise completely above it in thought, the proponent of premodern virtue who opposed the way of the world, and the Romantic enthusiast for a community of racial or religious fervor. Of these three types, only the third overcomes alienation from the group immediately around him, but he does so by alienating himself from his own implicit claim to have reasons for his stance. Hegel’s philosophy was intended to overcome the forms of alienation represented by the first two types while overcoming the irrationalism of the third. I have attempted something similar in relation to my interlocutors in philosophy, political theory, and religious thought.

The key to being able to reconcile oneself responsibly to one’s social situation, Hegel thought, is to identify with what is rational in it. A social situation devoid of rationality would of course be hopeless; there would be no reason to reconcile oneself to it. If I were actually in such a situation, I would be incapable of knowing it, because I would not know anything. A social situation devoid of rationality would be one in which I would have no way to acquire the conceptual skills required to criticize it. But if rationality is itself necessarily embodied in a social practice, as Hegel argued, then I who think critical thoughts about my own society am actually dependent as a critic on what is rational in my social situation. I think, therefore I belong to a community of reason-exchangers. This is Hegel’s version of the Cartesian cogito. If I am truly conscious of what is going on when I perform acts of social criticism, the proper object of my identification will be neither disembodied reason, premodern virtue, nor my ethnic roots, but an actual community of reason-givers.¹⁵ The community at issue, then, is that constituted by our mutual recognition of one another as those to whom each one of us is responsible in the practice of exchanging reasons about ethical and political questions.

Brought down to the level of Community Park, this is just a way of saying that my neighbors and I do not need to agree with one another on some sort of philosophical or narrative framework to be a community in the relevant sense. We are already members of such a community insofar as we are disposed to hold one another responsible in the exchange of reasons. To declare our reasons to the hospital administrators and demand reasons from them for their policies is to treat them as potential members of the same community. And if they choose to respond to us by giving reasons and holding themselves responsible to act reasonably, they will be members of that community.

Framing the issue in this way immediately draws attention to a deeper threat that democracy faces. For it is clear, in the case of the neighborhoods around Community Park, that the exchange of reasons might well be undermined in any number of ways, even if the community becomes conscious of itself as a community and if its spokespersons and officials behave wisely. For example, much depends in this case, as in so many other similar ones, on the independence, courage, and decency of the local press and judiciary. Only time will tell whether the hospital has already acquired a degree of power and influence over the relevant media and decision-making organs that permits it to have its way without having to give good reasons for its further acquisition of property. A single bad decision by a single fallible official could easily bring it about that there is no discursive community left that is capable of mounting resistance on its own behalf.

If we move above the local level, it is obvious to any fair-minded observer that corporate influence over the electoral and legislative processes now threatens to circumvent a politically effective and open public exchange of reasons on issues of concern to the citizenry. One cannot honestly call our mode of government democratic if corporate influence on it is so strong that the reasons offered by the public against its decisions have little bearing on legislative outcomes. It is now hard to claim with a straight face that either the Supreme Court or the press retains its traditional independence of the political process. A severely worrisome development is the rapid shrinkage of the number of corporations controlling the means of public communication, both in the United States and internationally. “Six firms dominate all American mass media.”¹⁶ Not long ago the number was fifty. Globally, the communications system “is dominated by three or four dozen large transnational corporations … with fewer than ten mostly U.S.-based media conglomerates towering over the global market.”¹⁷ It will take all of the intellectual and organizational creativity that the next generation of democrats can muster to sustain recognizably democratic forms of public discourse in contemporary circumstances.

I do not suppose that democratic rule is a simple matter, to be achieved by some sort of unmediated popular uprising. There is an indispensable role for “small dedicated groups” of committed democrats to play in the revival of democracy. No sensible democrat can be opposed to “elites” in this benign sense.¹⁸ Whitman must have been conscious of his own dependence on the circle of literary radicals that had gathered around Emerson.¹⁹ The social structure of a healthy modern democracy would include a plurality of such groups, several million serious activists, and a broader body of professionals and citizens prepared to hear signals of alarm, exchange reasons in their local settings, donate some time and money, and cast their votes accordingly.²⁰ Despite our evident vices, this is not beyond the bounds of reasonable hope. In a narrowly political context, the question of character thus becomes the question of whether and how we can go about shaping people who have the virtues required to play these roles.

Over the next several years these virtues will probably be much needed and sorely tested in determining the course of the struggle against terror. The struggle will be against our own fear and resentment as much as it will be against terrorism itself. Democratically committed intellectuals and journalists have a crucial role to play in articulating and reinforcing the people’s latent desire for justice over against the other passions that tend to arise when a nation is under attack. It is also their duty to make clear to our political and military leaders that not a single injustice against the civilian populations of our own country and other countries will go unnoticed or unopposed. The struggle against terror—against the fear and resentment that turn democracies into imperial tyrannies—will last as long and face as many obstacles and setbacks as the struggle against terrorism itself.

The struggle against terrorism must be joined simultaneously on three fronts—one involving the disciplined use of armed force against terrorists and their supporters, a second involving the building up of international law, and a third involving persuasive argument on behalf of democracy. I have grave doubts about our conduct on all three fronts. On the military front, we have taken insufficient care to protect civilian life and shown little interest in committing ourselves to restraint in the use of force in the future. On the legal front, we have often ignored and otherwise undermined existing international law. On the ideological front, we have foundered at nearly every turn.

We rightly declare terrorism an abomination. And why is that? Because the terrorist takes deliberate aim at innocent civilians. We denounce regimes that make and use weapons of mass destruction. Right again. But we are not prepared to come to terms with the implications of these claims. The world remembers what we would like to forget. We are the ones who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we did it on the premise that inducing terror in the civilian population of Japan would achieve unconditional surrender more quickly and at less cost than would otherwise have been possible. This has always been Islamic radicalism’s most effective ideological weapon against us, and Osama bin Laden used it with relish in his most influential arguments. We have made and used weapons of mass destruction; we have yet to repent for this. Instead, we have retained them, tested them, and often aimed them at cities. More recently, our arrogant use of massively destructive military power announces that one nation, unconstrained by international law, will henceforth decide which regimes stand or fall. When our leaders oppose or support tyranny as it suits them, why suppose them to be interested in justice? They deliberately confuse the public about their reasons for war and the facts that justify resorting to it. They pretend to know the price of their policies in dollars, in the goodwill of other nations, and in human life. They extol humility, tradition, compassion, and democracy, while laying plans to rule the world. They propose their own will as the standard of right and wrong.

Do these objections justify terrorist attacks against us? Of course not. Nothing could justify such behavior. But until we sincerely and persuasively renounce the callous taking of civilian life and the casual tolerance of dictators and princely tyrants, we will be seen as both hypocritical and terrifyingly dangerous. It is foolish to expect the world to believe on the basis of little more than our saying so that we are committed to democracy and justice. The world suspects that we believe in technological might, oil, money, and entertainment. Our deepest apparent commitment is simply to having our way. It is one thing to have just cause to wage war, another to have the moral authority to do so.

In the long run, the ideological-moral front is the one on which the struggle against terrorism will be won or lost, and we are now losing it very badly. In truth, there is only one way to win it. That is by applying our ideals and principles to our own conduct with the same sense of purpose and courage that we demonstrated when denouncing Taliban thugs. In this rhetorical engagement, the character exhibited in the conduct of the arguer will determine who believes and trusts what is said. We will be sorely tempted in the months ahead to make exceptions on our own behalf. Yet we must somehow find it in us to become the people we are claiming to be. To win the struggle against terrorism, we must win the struggle against terror within our own political community.

WHERE THESE WATERS FLOW

I want to conclude by briefly considering a version of the question of character that was recently posed by the Augustinian political theorist, Jean Bethke Elshtain, at a conference I attended in Richmond, Virginia. As she put the question, “How long before the stream runs dry?” The stream, I take it, is a metaphor for the sources of ethical and religious virtue that sustain our democracy. Her worry was that citizens of democracies are in the process of losing the virtues needed for having a democracy at all. It is only a matter of time, she feared, before the stream runs dry. I believe many sensible citizens are asking themselves something like this version of the question of character today.

Now, how does Whitman respond? In fact, he offers no answer to it. He does not say how long it will be before the stream runs dry. His real interest, I think, is in the prior question of where we imagine those waters to flow. His answer, in “Autumn Rivulets,” was this:

In you whoe’er you are my book perusing,

In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing …²¹

The import of this answer is that we should not imagine the life-giving sources on which we depend as something essentially alien to American democratic modernity. That stream is in us and of us when we engage in our democratic practices. Democracy, then, is misconceived when taken to be a desert landscape hostile to whatever life-giving waters of culture and tradition might still flow through it. Democracy is better construed as the name appropriate to the currents themselves in this particular time and place. In North Star Country—a “history of the people of the Midwest, told from their dimension in their language”—Meridel Le Sueur imagines the people as

a river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns; lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet, emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is long incessant coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons, babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable. The people always know that some of the grain will be good, some of the crop will be saved, some will return and bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year some survive to outlive the frost.²²