While We’re At It

♦ The minders at Twitter recently censored a First Things tweet. We use Twitter to promote content, and did so for Jonathon Van Maren’s December 6 essay, “The New Women’s Movement.” Maren documents the feminist reaction against transgender ideology, driven by young women who were subjected to hormonal therapy and mastectomies as children. He also draws attention to women who are fighting the pornography industry, which is almost entirely unregulated. Twitter censors blocked our promotional tweet, substituting a warning: “This tweet might include sensitive content.” That’s correct. Maren’s report is shocking and painful to read. It is so because shocking and painful things are happening in our society, and they occur with the full support of our political and cultural establishment. Shame on the Twitter censors. But far and away the greater crime is the complicity, even endorsement, of the rich and powerful.

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♦ Emily Oster’s title says it all: “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” In her Atlantic article she allows that the draconian measures were often more damaging than helpful and rarely as effective as promised. Trillions of dollars were spent. Schools were closed, and student test scores are down dramatically. Vaccines were oversold. Mental health is at an all-time low. Okay, these are bad things, but Oster is keen that we let bygones by bygones. All the mistakes were in good faith, she insists. Nobody should be blamed! I predict exactly the same line will be pushed when the transgender mania recedes and the Great and Good allow that, well, perhaps some mistakes were made, and, okay, some lives were ruined, and, fair enough, there was a Jacobin spirit of persecution of anyone who dissented—but it was all in good faith.

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♦ Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. has been a great scourge of elite groupthink. He has called out the officially approved lies designed to manipulate us into complying with the elite’s determinations of what is best for us. Jenkins was relentless during the pandemic, pointing out that “stop the spread” was always an unrealistic goal, not unlike the Chinese “­zero COVID” policy recently derided by journalists who only two years ago were championing similar policies in the United States. Jenkins shames the public health profession for its distortion of the facts.

And the complicity with lies extends beyond pandemic policies. In a recent column, he draws attention to the way in which, during the recent presidential campaign, the prestige media suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. The editors of the Washington Post took at face value the statement of a group of former top intelligence officials that the laptop was a Russian ruse to influence the election. In truth, those intelligence officials lied, knowing full well that it was implausible to think the laptop was anything other than Hunter’s. Two years later, Jenkins observes that newsrooms are singularly uninterested in revisiting this episode to unpack it and explain to the American people who perpetrated this misinformation and why. Jenkins’s explanation: “So obvious was the lie that America’s biggest news organizations have to remain silent now because of their own complicity.” He goes on to quote his own comment on the story from 2020: “It ought to register with you how cravenly some of the mainstream media are trying to convince you something isn’t true that they know is true.” As we saw in the case of pandemic policies, our elite has no appetite for reconsideration, and certainly none for repentance.

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♦ Harold Laski’s 1946 assessment of communist activists: They “act without moral scruples, intrigue without any sense of shame, are utterly careless of truth, sacrifice without any hesitation the means they use to the end they serve.” Are the Great and the Good in our own time any different? Laski continues, “The only rule to which the Communist gives unswerving loyalty is the rule that a success gained is a method justified.” Trump was defeated, and I’m willing to bet that the fifty-­one intelligence experts who signed a group letter that conjured a Russian plot count their success sufficient to justify their lies. And I’m sure the same success in securing Trump’s defeat assuages the consciences of the reporters and editors who were complicit in the politically motivated misinformation.

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♦ I very much hope that the war in Ukraine can be brought to a successful conclusion. But what if it is not, and the conflict becomes a long-term suppurating wound on Europe’s border or, worse, escalates? Our political and cultural establishment has urged unbending support for Ukraine. What if things go sour? I’m confident that the Great and the Good will insist upon ­amnesty: It was all in good faith. That’s the kind of leaders we have in the 2020s. They demand the credit (and ­reward) for any success and none of the blame for their failures.

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♦ Writing in the National Review “Capital Matters” column, David L. Bahnsen takes issue with my December 2022 Public Square, “Church, State, and the Common Good.” Among his criticisms is the charge that I make a philosophical mistake.

As a basic tautology, virtue is not compulsory, and while a tight legal order to punish criminal behavior is vital for a functioning society, economists, theorists, and our founders have always been aware of the limitations of a coercive state. No amount of state power can foster love and gratitude. The unwillingness to accept this basic reality of moral philosophy—that doing good is not good when it is forced; that acts of charity are only charitable when they are voluntary—sticks to Reno’s argument throughout.

I also hold that virtue cannot be compelled, nor can love and gratitude be produced by demand. But there is a middle ground between coercion and license. As any parent knows, virtue can be encouraged, and nurturing it is a mark of good parenting. Society is not a family, but it, too, can encourage virtue.

The charitable tax deduction is an incentive to give away money. It does not “create” virtue. There are plenty of less-than-admirable motives for the wealthy to make donations. But the tax deduction tilts the slope in the direction of virtue. The same goes for gratitude. In my youth, school boards set standards for civic education that emphasized our achievements as a country. I can report that this approach encouraged me to have gratitude for the courage of those who rallied at Concord and for the wisdom of those who crafted our constitutional form of government. I’ll venture that officially mandated instruction in accord with the 1619 Project will have the opposite effect.

I could go on, but I won’t. Common sense teaches us that governmental action can do more than prohibit and require. One of the basic assumptions of Reagan-era conservatism was that marginal tax rates affect behavior. Lower capital gains taxes do not require me to start a company or invest in stocks. They do not require companies to prefer stock buybacks to dividends. There can be no doubt, however, that lower rates encourage these behaviors, and others as well. And economic incentives affect culture. I guarantee that eliminating federal income tax for couples with four or more children would increase the percentage of four-child families headed by professionals with high incomes. Perhaps such a policy is unwise. But one thing it would not be is coercive.

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♦ Pierre Manent on the seductions of Whiggery:

One of the strengths of modernity [by “strengths” ­Manent means ideological power], of the modern mind, and of modern philosophy is that it produces the feeling that it is irreversible. At work in the modern dispensation is a sense of philosophical necessity: a demand that you believe in the newness of modernity as something that evolves inevitably out of the past and is by definition superior to it.

By my reading of the signs of the times, interest in Catholic integralism, Christian nationalism, or other political views that were only yesterday thought dead and buried stems from the desire to break modernity’s hold, to undermine its claims to inevitability, and to open space for imagining something different.

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♦ St. Augustine on our temptation to be zealous for falsehoods:

People have such a love for truth that when they happen to love something else, they want it to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be proven wrong, they refuse to be shown their mistake. And so, they end up hating the truth for the sake of the object which they have come to love instead of the truth.

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♦ In early December, Lifeway Research reported a baffling statistic: In 2022, 84 percent of Protestant pastors said that their churches planned to have a service on Christmas Day. More than 15 percent were closed? On the feast of the Incarnation of our Lord? Which fell on a Sunday?

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♦ Thurston Davis, S.J., was the editor in chief of the flagship Jesuit publication America from 1955 to 1968. A reader passed along a passage Davis wrote as a graduate student in 1943. In “Blueprint for a College,” the young Jesuit foresaw the need for strong Catholic leaders:

The coming generation of Catholics faces a showdown, and we Jesuits should attempt to fit them for the battle of the next half-century. It will be a half-century dominated by a monster secular press, class struggle, godless universities, and tremendous technical achievements in many of the means used to form public opinion. These are but a few of the fronts on which the battle will be joined, and it will be a battle for the culture and soul of America. It will be won or lost in the newspaper, the theater, on the radio, in the labor union, the city hall, and the classroom. The Church needs leaders in these storm-centers of American life.

Prescient. And truth be told, the postwar Society of ­Jesus did not fail to fulfill the need for leaders to stand up against the powerful instruments of secular propaganda. Justice Antonin Scalia was Jesuit-educated in the decade immediately following Davis’s call to action. Joe Biden? He was untouched by Jesuit education. My hunch is that a list of prominent Americans who attended Jesuit high schools in the postwar era would feature a large number of public figures who fought the good fight.

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♦ A number of friends contacted me to correct my mistaken identification of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia as a Jesuit. The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and grand chancellor of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences is a priest of the Diocese of Rome.

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♦ Marc Sierra runs the ROFTERS group in the Detroit metro area. New members are welcome to join. You can contact him at sierramarc1000@gmail.com.

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♦ As this issue goes to press, our year-end campaign is drawing to a close. I’m very grateful for the financial support provided by our readership. Your generosity plays an essential role in the success of First Things.