My reply to James Buchanan has been featured among several other responses, over at Cato Unbound.

I think the excerpted version of my post that Will Wilkinson put up is probably better than the original, which makes me think-- maybe I just really need an editor. Then again, when I write for print publication I live in deep fear of disappointing my editors, so it takes an agonizing all-nighter to produce a TNR op-ed when I can dash off a blog-post twice the length in an hour of admin.

At any rate, I stand by my original complaint about James Buchanan's proposal to amend the constitution, which is that it is awfully hard for We The Living to get life-tenured judges in future generations to do what we want. In his latest response Buchanan suggests that it is the debate that is important, and he has something of a point, but it would still be nice if we could settle on a precise constitutional text, so we knew what we were debating for.

Over the summer, I had an argument with a Friend of Crescat about whether legal scholars ever changed the world (at a considerably more abstract level than Dan Solove's fascinating investigation). Reading a speech by Frank Easterbrook in the University of Colorado Law Review, I see that he said what I tried to say that summer, only better:

A free mind is apt to err-- most mutations in thought, as well as in genes, are neutral or harmful-- but because intellectual growth flows from the best of today standing on the shoulders of the tallest of yesterday, the failure or most scholars and their ideas is unimportant. High risk probably is an essential ingredient of high gain.

Questioning whether Christianity is more than a Christian ethic seems to be a common theme these days (lv: The American Scene). Perhaps it is the Christmas Season, or perhaps it is because of the continuing (and continuingly tiresome) framing of the Intelligent Design debate as a conflict between Science and Faith, but whatever the cause, the retread of this question produces few points of interest or edification. It is probably because the typical debate participant accepts its shoddy frame, meaning that we poor spectators peer through a fogged windowpane only to see quite a few Biblical "literalists" take arms against a sea of militant material monists, and by opposing, bore them. Worse still are the peacekeepers: the calm hand-wringing "Christians" (as Erik Reece's article in this month's Harper's, "Jesus without the Miracles") who reduce faith and good works to good works alone, in the misguided hope that by whitewashing the terms of salvation, they might, like Tom Sawyer, enlist everyone else into the enterprise; and the soft appeasers of science, for whom every unsolved problem of material is a beacon to the heavens (nevermind that this means scientific discovery steadily turns out the lights on God, as if God and our theories of natural phenomenon were set in a grim zero-sum war, fiat lux dissolving in the furnaces of a thousand distant thermonuclear fusion reactions).

Still, that distressingly long piece in this months Harper's illustrates an insecurity at the basis of the liberal consensus. Whence our principles? By containing Jesus, by making Christianity a historical-ethical tradition alone, secular moralists are able to have their cake and eat it too. They are able to locate their groundless ground within a historically effected moral hermeneutic (the weight, the authority of Christ), but they are able also to pick and choose a set of values by denying the fixedness of the very authority they cite. Upon this rock, which is not really rock, I will build my welfare state.

Needless to say, this feels a bit shoddy. Christianity is precisely about Christ's resurrection, that is to say the belief in divinity's presence in and rupture of the material world. This is not to argue, contra Ms. Welborn, that Christianity is about the miracles. There is a danger in monism of either flavor. But she has it eminently right when she points out that the Christian ethic is not particularly original or captivating. To be a Christian without believing in the Resurrection is to be a Good Samaritan. Which is of course perfectly fine (better sheep than goat); so why the need to appropriate Christ?

As an agnostic, and a cultural Jew, I understand the moral insecurity. Our formulations of a pragmatic liberal ethic are necessarily on unsteady philosophical ground. We act on the presence of values in conflict, on the incommensurability of those values, and on the rights and capabilities needed to negotiate and permit those conflicts. Tradition and the law inform our choices and the state structures that permit their exercise and interaction with others, but without either a Hegelian belief that these ideas are marching apace besides us, or a Faith in some noumenal truth, our movement towards moral action is one of continual imperfect semiosis. Such a process brings with it decided anxieties, and understanding this modern anxiety is central to understanding why even among secular liberals, there exists an ache for a doctrine of totality. (It also is a stellar argument for Berlinian restraint.)

This doctrine, of course, need not be Christian. It can instead be the foolish logic of the parahistorical, but the reach is a symptom of the same malady. Elsewhere at The American Scene, Ross sagaciously cites Eco, writing in one of his (and my) favorite novels, Foucault's Pendulum, against the perils of over-interpretation. But while the book itself closes with an argument for a limited, almost tautological aesthetic apperception of the real ("It makes no difference whether I write or not. They will look for other meanings, even in my silence. That's how They are. Blind to revelation. Malkhut is Malkhut, and that's that. / But try telling Them. They of little faith. / So I might as well stay here, wait, and look at the hill. / It's so beautiful" (533)), as Svetlana Boym notes:

"the novel presents a more complex ethical challenge than a morality tale. While Eco would like us to examine Foucault's Pendulum as a cautionary tale against what he called "unlimited semiosis," the novel reads more like a 1980s version of the allegory of temptation, where the representation of temptation appears much more seductive than its antidote (1999: 114).

The "antidote" in modern life is a deeply unsatisfying scepticism, a limited appeal to reason whose only salvation when contrasted against the security of Revelation is the sureness with which it places its stumbling feet. The challenge for the unbeliever in these parlous times is to try and negotiate a vision of a society between Jerusalem and Athens, rather than between Jerusalem and Babylon.

A Note: I am sometimes asked, “why Crescat?” There are many reasons, not least Will’s great charity. But foremost (besides a shared love of a lewd and winsome young Russian girl, and compassion for her ginger-haired sis) is the idea that the denizens here are attempting to chart, through the law and other avenues, some of the difficult path of non-belief. I know that the libertarian distinctions raised here check some of my exuberances—and others force me to strengthen and refine my positions. But it is mostly the idea that we are fellow cartographers that I find compelling, here consumed with the “maker’s rage to order words… of ourselves and of our origins, [i]n ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”