Against Peer Fear

In response to many inquiries, we are pleased to report that Father Neuhaus continues to recover very satisfactorily from early January’s emergency surgery for colon cancer. As this issue goes to press, the usual battery of tests, plus exploration during surgery for the reversal of a temporary colostomy, indicate that there has been no spread of the cancer whatever. He will continue with chemotherapy for some months, thankful that the treatment has not been as debilitating as is often the case. He has been able to work part time since mid-February and we confidently expect that he will be fully engaged in the near future. He requests that we thank the numerous readers who have helped sustain him with messages of concern and, above all, with their prayers. Please continue to join us in remembering him before the Throne of Grace.

—JN

The Public Square

One regularly gets inquiries from aspiring writers eager to be published. So it always has been, and so it should be. Quite possibly, there is right now some aspiring twenty-five-year-old graduate student working on her first major article that we will be pleased to feature in a forthcoming issue. Although we publish only a very small portion of all the manuscripts received, a significant portion of what we do publish arrives unsolicited (over the transom, as they say). Frequently an author will say in his covering letter that, while the present piece may not be ready for prime time, he would appreciate editorial criticism of his efforts. The press of duties tends to make such detailed criticism impossible, but a word or two of general advice might be helpful. As will be seen, the following word is about more than getting published.

Perhaps nothing so prevents good articles from being written, or so spoils good articles that are written, than what we might call peer fear. Of course we are talking chiefly about academic authors (and most of our authors are academics in one way or another). Peer fear results in not writing for a general audience, not even writing to make a clear argument, but, rather, looking over one’s shoulder at what colleagues in “the guild” might think. The product, all too often, is not an article but a kind of sprawling annotated bibliography—as X says, although taking into account Y’s emendation as elaborated by P,— and so forth. Annotated bibliographies are useful things, as are florilegiums of pertinent opinions on a given subject, but they are not articles.

The trick is to find what is sometimes called one’s own voice. Here is the subject, here is why it is important, and this is what I have to say about it that nobody else seems to have said, or at least not to have said in quite this way. What Richard Roarbee and Catherine McUpures and Jacques Dadildo have said on the subject may be very interesting—and, at least obliquely, the author should ordinarily evidence a familiarity with the arguments made by such worthies—but in this office we work on the assumption that people read an article because they hope that this author has something important to say to them.

Academic Thought Control 

To be sure, it is easy for us to deplore the toll exacted by peer fear, but pity the poor graduate students and junior faculty who have good reason to fear their peers if they are ever to obtain job security and the grand prize of tenure. It is no accident, as our Marxist friends used to say, that many, if not most, of our featured authors are either safely tenured or comfortably removed from the cramped arenas of academic combat. Although it is a source of constant wonder how many of the securely tenured are still intimidated by peer fear. They will privately grumble about the “smelly little orthodoxies” that hold so much of academe in thrall, but they are not about to make themselves difficult. Others among senior faculty are preoccupied with their academic specialities, which is fair enough, and yet others take tenure to mean retirement from serious work, which is not fair at all but is part of a system that very few people have a vested interest in challenging.

For academics of both the ensconced and imperiled variety, writing for a journal such as this is usually not a smart career move. The ensconced need not worry, but the junior aspirant has no choice but to worry about what will look good on his resume when his name comes up before the tenure committee at Toetheline U. Items written for and within “the discipline” will receive a sympathetic nod, while it is deemed suspiciously unprofessional to have written for a “general audience,” never mind in a journal well known to be annoyingly incorrect. The place to publish is in “scholarly” journals sponsored by the relevant academic guild, and in such journals prospective articles are “refereed” by a company of one’s peers.

We don’t know about structural engineering and brain surgery, but in the fields more pertinent to our interests—e.g., theology, philosophy, ethics, legal theory, cultural criticism—refereeing is, increasingly, censorship with respect not to competence but to orthodoxy. We have no objection to censorship in principle—after all, editors are inescapably in the censorship business, whether they like to admit it or not—but we do object to material that gives evidence of having been written in sweated anxiety not to push the buttons of angry ideologues who presume to guard what is published “in the field.” When it comes to deciding whether to run an article or, for that matter, whether to give it a serious reading, a reliable rule of thumb is to exclude anything that looks like it might have been refereed. There are those scholarly journals for that kind of thing, even if nobody reads them.

That may sound anti-intellectual, but in reality there is nothing more anti-intellectual than the party lines that today dominate so much of academic writing and discourse. Sometimes it is Marxist (yes, Virginia, there are still Marxists), sometimes racialist (advanced in the cause of combatting racism), sometimes feminist (and, if radical, likely lesbian), and, increasingly, sometimes gay. Of course fine scholarship is still being done in many places, and of course specialized journals are necessary for specialized purposes, and, yes, we confess to reading with more than cursory attention the scholarly publications that we must.

But one gets the impression that most academics (at least those who have not confused tenure with retirement) have turned themselves round and round, burrowing ever deeper into the holes of “their” questions, while others eagerly feed their anger on pet resentments such as those marked out by the ideological lines mentioned above. Such is the corruption of the intellectual life in our time, or—and one notes this with relief—the limited part of the intellectual life that is dependent upon the university. Such is the unhappy circumstance of those academics caught in the paralyzing grip of peer fear.

Who Is “Qualified”? 

Here at hand is a letter from yet another young professor, this one in a Methodist seminary. Did we know that at his school it has been baldly stated that nobody will get tenure who does not enhance the faculty’s “inclusiveness”—meaning nobody who is not female, a person of color, or assertively homosexual? Well, no, we didn’t know it about that school, but why should it be different? A distinguished theologian at a prestige university tells us that he advises his white, male doctoral students to have some more practicable backstop if they’re thinking of an academic career. At a once distinguished nondenominational seminary, a young black woman was recently appointed associate professor, with tenure. She had not quite completed her doctoral thesis, but the appointments committee was assured that it would be ever so creative.

Raising questions about “qualifications” elicits a knowing sneer from the ideologically perfected. To be a woman, or a gay, or a person of color, or a member of any group certifiably marginal is itself qualification more than enough. To those who protest the unfairness and dishonesty of the system, the answer is that now outsiders are getting the advantage of unfair preferences that used to be enjoyed only by insiders. In speaking this way, people apparently do not recognize that they are casting contempt upon the disciplines and institutions of which they are part. It is and always has been a power game, they say, and the spoils go to those who play the game without scruple. Fancy talk about excellence and academic achievement simply disguises the nature of the game. Anyway—and with maximum offense to the racists, sexists, and homophobes who don’t like it—we who once claimed to be fighting The System are now in charge of it. And that’s the way things are.

A reader might object that this picture of the academy—notably in theology, philosophy, and associated fields—is altogether too bleak. We take no joy in bearing bad news, but the reader is wrong. Admittedly, the lines of fear are drawn differently at some Evangelical Protestant and Catholic institutions. Rather than race, gender, and sexual orientation, the Evangelical lines may be drawn at the question of biblical inerrancy or, at other schools, one may be excluded for having a favorable word to say about those awful fundamentalists. While Catholic scholars who suggest, for example, that this pontificate may actually have something to teach of theological worth definitely do not have a brilliant career in prospect. They will not be invited to the right (meaning, usually, left) academic conferences, nor will their papers pass peer review. And if they write intellectually serious books, they will likely be published by alternative presses, although a few might sneak their way on to the lists of publishers of academic respectability. (Among Catholics, alternative presses include Ignatius, which publishes supposed antiques such as de Lubac, von Balthazar, and Karol Wojtyla, a.k.a. John Paul II.

Cowardice and Conformity 

The contemporary academy is, to put it delicately, deeply corrupted by cowardice and conformity, which are mutually reinforcing. This is not to imply that those who dissent from the ideologically correct are consistently possessed of intelligence and talent unjustly spurned. That company has more than its fair share of cranks, and of mediocrities in search of any excuse for being such. But the onus rests on those responsible for the sorry state of higher education. On presidents who chiefly preside over endowments, deans who buy peace at any price, junior faculty who go along to get along, and senior faculty who stopped going anywhere a long time ago.

It is wrongheaded to blame the militant ideologues who are, after all, only doing what they say they are doing, conducting the long march through the institutions, a march that has resulted in triumphs with no end in sight. Having exacted agreement on the dangerously simplified proposition that there is no such thing as objective, value-free search for truth, they are making the most of the license to be outrageously and enragedly partisan in their declared war against civility, fairness, and disinterested inquiry. The consequence is that the academy today is, in very large part, the enemy of the intellectual life.

Of all the actors mentioned, only the junior faculty and graduate students warrant a measure of sympathy. What are they to do when their positions, their futures, their very livelihoods depend upon the ideological passions of petty tyrants? True, they could leave the academy to make an honest living, but some of them believe that they have something like a vocation, and maybe they do. Perhaps the present pestilence is designed to test vocations. The almost inescapable peer fear may lead to trimming at the edges, but the occasional accommodation of cowardice need not be craven. Most people are not cut out to be heroes, and it is understandable that they do not want to be thought difficult. In a highly disagreeable world, there is a good deal to be said for being likeable and liked. As Norfolk proposed to Sir Thomas in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, why not go along for friendship’s sake? Thus is cowardice confused with congeniality.

Needed: Resisters 

What these young people desperately need is exemplars of resistance, maybe even of courage, within the academy. Their elders who resist will typically be in safe positions, thus diminishing somewhat the glitter of their courage, but they could at some point, in some institutions, form a critical mass that assures their juniors that there just might be life after the defiance of peer fear. Toward that end, we publish a journal, conduct conferences, and sponsor research projects that aim to nurture the intellectual life. It sounds embarrassingly old-fashioned, but we are devoted to inquiry that is intelligent and free, and to an inclusiveness that includes different and sometimes conflicting convictions. That devotion puts this journal and similar enterprises (for there are, thank God, others) in an awkward and sometimes painful relationship to the contemporary academy.

Many years ago, this writer was in a seminar with the late Saul Alinsky, the radical community organizer who founded the Industrial Areas Foundation. “Decide right now,” said Alinsky to the gathered seminarians, “whether you want to be a bishop.” His point was that those with episcopal ambitions were wasting their time in his course. And so we say, somewhat more gently, to the aspiring young academic who is interested in publishing here: Give careful thought to whether you can live with the prospect of not getting tenure. All the counter-pressures notwithstanding, there are an encouraging number of young scholars who seem prepared to live with that prospect, or at least to risk it. Those who have arrived on the far side of peer fear are, one is inclined to think, more likely to do something worthwhile with the tenure that, despite all, they may one day attain.

Against the Curia

The lead article in the March issue (“Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for Decline”) offered evidence that relatively few people who have dropped out of the churches were turned off by the churches’ pronouncements on social and political questions. Most of them are not even aware of religious statements and activism in the public arena. It is a great pity. Not because the churches have in recent years contributed much to moral discourse in our political culture, but because they could and should.

The few people who are attentive to the guidance offered by mainstream churches on matters political have, more often than not, discovered that guidance to be woefully wrongheaded. Studies are done and statements are issued by the staffs of the church-and-society curia chiefly for the delectation of other members of the curia who are busily lobbying, along with their usually liberal colleagues from other “interest groups,” in the halls of government both state and national. Belonging to the special interest group that is in charge of “the moral dimension of public policy” is heady stuff. It also means never having to say you’re sorry. Consider, for example, the churches and the collapse of Communism.

As time goes by, we will no doubt learn more and more about what really happened during the Cold War, and about who and what contributed to its ending. Here is a report on a Princeton University conference that brought together former officials of the U.S. and USSR. Top aides to former president Gorbachev claimed that the crucial factor in the demise of the Soviet Union was Ronald Reagan’s simultaneous push for a U.S. arms build-up and negotiations for arms reduction. Soviet economic and other difficulties were “compounded by the Reagan Administration’s interest in developing a Strategic Defense Initiative anti-missile shield, which Moscow saw as destabilizing because it meant the United States had less to fear from a retaliatory Soviet strike if it struck the Soviet Union first.” The report adds, with a nice laconic touch, “The United States speakers at the conference seemed to take ‘star wars’ less seriously.”

Appeasers and Resisters 

They have good reason to take star wars less seriously now. At the time, most of them held it in derision. The very term, star wars, was one of intended comic dismissiveness. And, among the Americans who at the time were mockingly contemptuous of star wars, our several religious leaderships in the oldline Protestant and Catholic communities were second to none. In the 1980s the chiefs of mainstream correctness were unanimous in condemning the arms build-up, and star wars in particular, as financially wasteful, militarily futile, and, above all, a threat to “stability.” How to say this gently? During the longest and most terrible conflict between political freedom and tyranny, the American establishments, including its religious establishment, were resolutely on the side of appeasing tyranny.

It was called, both by the tyrants and by their apologists in the West, peaceful coexistence. There was one political leader (importantly aided by Margaret Thatcher and a few others) who insisted that Communism was a temporary aberration, that we must not accept the notion of its permanence. As former Secretary of State George Shultz said at Princeton, Reagan might call the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” but he also “believed he could turn it into a good empire.” Whether Russia turns out to be a good empire, or even an empire, is still to be seen, but the evil empire is ended largely because Reagan and those who supported his intention knew that destabilization was not the threat but the hope.

Apparently receiving less attention at Princeton was the role of another player, John Paul II, who understood that the end of Communism was not only a matter of arms, economics, and politics but, most of all, a matter of the spirit (and the Spirit). The story of religion, and of the Catholic Church in particular, in the events that led up to 1989 is compellingly told in George Weigel’s The Final Revolution(Oxford). Readers with a memory that extends beyond yesterday’s newspaper will recall that the choirmasters of conventional wisdom harshly criticized the Pope as a dangerous “cold warrior,” as they also publicly fretted over the distressingly destabilizing effects of the dissident democrats within the captive nations. (After Vaclav Havel had triumphed in Czechoslovakia, he was grandly feted by the glitterati of New York. A friend observed that there were not all that many in the ballroom who had publicly spoken out in Havel’s defense when he was for years imprisoned by the Communist regime. He and his ilk were then viewed by many of the enlightened in the West as dangerously destabilizing.)

It is a nice irony that those religious and other leaders who most adamantly declared themselves to be the enemies of the status quo were the main champions of the status quo in accepting the permanence of Communism. There are many good reasons to ignore the public policy pronouncements of the bureaucracies of mainstream religion, both Protestant and Catholic. On issue after issue, but on no issue more than Communism and what ought to be done about it, they have been dead and, sometimes, deadly wrong. There is no sin in being wrong, but there is something like sin in being wrong with such consistent moral pretension. The unspeakable sadness is that, as our society becomes ever more desperately in need of informed moral discourse, the institutions that might have been expected to provide such discourse have so thoroughly discredited themselves.

The sadness is compounded in the case of the Catholic bishops, precisely because they are so painfully right on questions related to the protection of the powerless, notably on abortion and euthanasia. Where they are right they are ineffectual because where they are wrong they are so obdurate. With admirable individual exceptions, bishops have frittered away their credibility in the endless weaving of a “seamless garment” with gossamer threads of liberal prescription, all intended to compensate for their being embarrassingly out of step on, most significantly, abortion.

The United States Catholic Conference (USCC) in Washington is poignantly eager to let us know that it is not a one-issue operation. One of its top operatives recently remarked that not much had changed with the Clinton election. “We disagreed with Reagan and Bush on some issues and agreed with them on others, and the same is true with the Clinton administration.” In this view of the moral equivalence of the Church’s concerns, the USCC can disagree with Clinton on abortion, the promotion of fetal transplants, and government monopoly on education funds while happily agreeing with the administration on trade policy to Japan, the regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, and the just distribution of cable television franchises. It finally makes little difference. Lose three issues, win three issues, and you come out even.

The mindlessness of the church-and-society apparat now feeds on itself. Whether Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Episcopalian, it just goes on and on. Budgets are trimmed from time to time but “the mission” continues. The curia speaks for itself and to itself, and the only solution is simply to shut it down, at a great saving of money and of embarrassment to the Christian cause. The maxim that should be followed is: When it is not necessary for the Church to speak, it is necessary for the Church not to speak. And when churches speak, they should speak to the audience that is their distinctive and should be their first concern, their own people. That manifestly is not happening now, and has not been for at least two decades.

Scandalous Ignorance 

Which brings us to a scandal that implicates also the conservative bodies of Evangelical Protestantism. There are about sixty million Catholics in the United States. Depending on how one defines Evangelical Protestant, there are fifty-plus million of them. Evangelicals and Catholics, then, constitute about 43 percent of the population. And it is a much more church-going part of the population than is that portion adhering to oldline Protestantism. Now, in the abortion debate of the last quarter-century, both Catholic and Evangelical leaderships have repeatedly declared that the protection of the unborn is their number one public policy concern. A quarter-century later, the evidence is that only 11 percent of Americans are even aware of what existing abortion policy is in this country.
That is, only 11 percent know that, under the Roe v. Wade regime, there is absolutely no legal protection for any unborn child; abortion is legal at any time for any reason during the nine months of pregnancy. Keep in mind that a large part of that 11 percent, possibly more than half, is composed of pro-abortionists who like the present regime just fine, and are determined to harden it in place. They have a steep vested interest in keeping the American people ignorant by perpetuating the falsehood that Roe makes abortion legal only in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. They are determined to prevent Americans from pondering the fact that nearly half of the 1.6 million abortions per year are repeat abortions and that abortion has become the “contraception of choice” for millions of women who are without men who accept responsibility for their sexual partners or their children.
And yet, abortion is presumably the number one concern of what is taken to be the leadership of two-thirds of religiously affiliated America. Not only have they failed to persuade their people to pro-life conviction, they have failed to communicate the most elementary facts about the question in dispute. There can be no doubt that millions of devout Evangelicals and Catholics, assured by the campaign and its captive media that he had moved to a “moderate” position on abortion, voted for Mr. Clinton in 1992. The failure of these churches, joined by a distinct minority among the oldline, is massive and should be indelibly imprinted on the record.

Six Crusades

In American history, there have been six crusade-like efforts in which religious communities were vitally engaged: the Revolution, abolition of slavery, abolition of polygamy, prohibition of alcohol, civil rights, and now abortion. There are of course many differences between these causes, but one notable difference is that in the earlier efforts the churches were in alliance with important sectors of the several elites of the society. This time, every other major constellation of societal leadership has been arrayed against those seeking to protect the unborn and others who are vulnerable to the choices of those able to choose. The communications media, the foundations, the universities, the oldline churches—all have been overwhelmingly pro-abortion. Measured by its philanthropies and financial support for cultural and educational programs, the business community must also be termed dominantly pro-abortion in its influence. (We do not mention that part of the business community that is the multimillion dollar abortion industry.) The Catholic Church since the beginning and Evangelical Protestantism since the late 1970s have been the only major institutional bases for the pro-life cause. All things considered, it is a wonder and a reason for gratitude that there still is a vibrant pro-life movement in 1993.

There is a second significant difference from earlier crusades. Whatever one thinks of the merits of their goals or means, in abolition, prohibition, and civil rights, the churches involved were singleminded. They knew what they meant when they said that they had a number one issue in the public arena. They communicated effectively with constituencies that made their convictions felt in the polling booth. They were not hobbled by the church-and-society bureaucracies that afflict Catholicism and most of Protestantism today. They did not have offices and commissions promoting a dozen or three dozen “number one” issues, depending on which interest group in their constituencies is squealing loudest at the moment. They had leaders. With very few exceptions, that cannot be said today.

So much for this month’s fusillade against the official redoubts of those who, in the name of religion, claim to be attending to “the moral dimension” of public policy. Yes, we have said most of this before. And, God giving the opportunity, we will almost certainly say it again. If the future is marked by a greater modicum of sanity, people will look back in astonishment at a time in American life when the churches—especially Catholics and Evangelicals—so blew their chance to make the vital connections between biblical faith, moral discourse, and public policy. Excuses can be found. Of course it is intimidating to be confronted by such a formidable array of opposition, but, apart from the morally incompetent, people choose to be intimidated. And of course there are innumerable Christians possessed of a painful yearning to be accepted by the hierophants of “mainstream” culture, but such have plagued the Christian cause from its beginning. They have not, at least not usually, been permitted to define the Church’s mission in the world.

And finally, of course the struggle is not over, and will not be until Our Lord returns in glory. It is true, as Eliot wrote, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” But in their great responsibility to infuse our common life with a sense of the source, the end, and the dignity of the human person, the churches have hardly tried. In what they have tried to do—weaving a shapeless garment of evasive consistency and trying to become players of consequence in Caesar’s political games—they have shown themselves to be foolish and inept. One would shy from such a harsh conclusion were one not convinced that we all face another judgment much more severe.

Butchered Logic

You have probably read something about “The Butcher of Avenue A,” a Dr. Abu Hayat who did abortions on the Lower East Side of New York, and is now convicted of doing them very shoddily. He is facing up to twenty years in jail. Rosa Rodriguez, eight months pregnant, came in for an abortion that was badly botched. Leaving the clinic with the abortion incomplete, Ms. Rodriguez changed her mind and the next day delivered a girl child at a hospital. Ana Rosa is now eighteen months old and is described by the press as a bright, active child “who loves to eat croissants and play with her sister Jenny.” The problem is that she has no right arm, it having been sliced off during the abortion process by Dr. Hayat.

The media had a field day with the Butcher of Avenue A. At the trial, more than thirty women came forward with stories of abuse similar to that of Rosa Rodriguez, although in other cases the babies did not survive the medical atrocities perpetrated by Hayat. The entire episode is a wondrous parable of our times.

Had Ana Rodriguez not survived, and had she not been missing an arm, we would have heard nothing about the Butcher of Avenue A, or the hundreds of abortionists who similarly exploit women in trouble. The pro-choice activists are determined to prevent any regulation of abortion clinics, even the minimal record-keeping mandated by Pennsylvania and upheld in last year’s Casey decision by the Supreme Court. Oddly enough, and despite Roe, New York still has on the books a law prohibiting abortions after “viability.” In reality, almost 4,000 abortions per year are performed in the state on children beyond the twentieth week. Nonetheless, Hayat was tried and convicted under that law, plus several others related to medical malpractice.

It does not require the mythical man from Mars to have critical distance enough to see the oddity in all this. Had Hayat killed Ana, he would have collected his fee and continued to be honored with the title of medical doctor with no questions asked. Pro-lifers have made much of the point that his legal and public relations problem was not in being a butcher but in being an inefficient butcher. His job, like the job of every abortionist, is to be a butcher, but he did it very poorly. Of course one might draw analogies with, for example, capital punishment and war. There would justifiably be a great outcry were an executioner to be as callous and incompetent as Hayat, or were soldiers in battle to inflict egregious suffering on those they kill. These tasks, which most might deem to be justified by necessity, are to be done quickly, cleanly, and, as much as possible, without upsetting public sensibilities.

As is detailed in, for instance, James Davison Hunter’s “What Americans Really Think About Abortion”(FT, June/July 1992), most people recognize that abortion is killing another human being.