Mugged by Uncertainty

Michael Kinsley

"Evolution of the Neocons," a recent op-ed column be the Los Angeles Times' Michael Kinsley, shows how the neoconservative movement has done a 180-degree turn since the 1970's and '80's. Where the neocons who drive foreign policy in the Bush administration have

... a "messianic vision" of using American power to spread democracy, an indifference to the crucial distinction between what would be nice and what is essential to national security, and excessive optimism that we can arrange things according to our own values in strange and faraway lands ...

the founders of neoconservatism looked askance at trying to impose American values elsewhere. Jeane Kirkpatrick, neoconservative emeritus from the Reagan years, once published an article that

... was a ferocious attack on President Carter for trying to "impose liberalization and democratization" on other countries. She mocked "the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." Democracy, she said, depends "on complex social, cultural and economic conditions." It "normally" takes "decades, if not centuries."

Part of the explanation for the about face, as Kinsley mentions, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pre-collapse neocons were mainly wanted to make certain that the communists would not win the Cold War. Indeed, Kinsley writes:

The core group [of original neocons] had famously been Trotskyites at City College in the 1930s. By the 1950s and 1960s, they had become anti-Communist liberals and supporters of the Vietnam War. ... Finally [after taking offense at various liberal programs and at the counterculture] Irving Kristol, dubbed the neocon godfather, decided to take the name [which had been coined by neoconservatism's opponents as a slur] as a compliment. He defined a neoconservative as "a liberal mugged by reality."

However, I see an overarching continuity here, despite the appearance of an about face. Kinsley himself alludes to it in his final sentences:

The seemingly easy spread of democracy over the last couple of decades may have disproved Kirkpatrick's pessimism. But all these explanations require an admission of error, something the neocons are not very good at. They are selling certainty.

They are selling certainty because they are seeking certainty. When our chances in the Cold War seemed touch and go, these folks were hell-bent on guaranteeing our victory, even if we had to climb into bed with dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran to bring it about.

Now that we've won that war, the new generation of neocons see muscular projections of American power abroad as the best guarantee that we'll win the current war against terrorism.

Again, it's all about certainty. Whatever ideological posture underwrites American certitude is the right one for the times. The best way to be certain of the results is to be cocksure of the grounding philosophy.

The hunt for certainty is everywhere today. I (who am a "liberal" Catholic) believe it infects the "conservative" side of the Catholic Church. Take, for example, this article in TIME magazine nominating Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as one the top 100 movers and shakers in the world. TIME writer Andrew Sullivan says:

Ratzinger has been a tough theological enforcer in the church for more than two decades. Once an enthusiast for the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, he later wondered if they had gone too far. Call him one of the first theo-conservatives—a former liberal mugged by what he saw as the reality of religious laxity.

His response has been, says Sullivan:

... to reassess the importance of the papacy as a means of asserting control over the church, to insist on the otherworldliness of religious faith and its imperviousness to changes in society.

The "control" asserted by a strong pope, be it noted, is what brings that greatest certainty. We got that same message from the pulpit at Mass yesterday, from a visiting priest who began his homily by noting recent coverage in The Baltimore Sun about individuals whom the good father asserted were "not real Catholics."

The article, I knew, was In the church, on their own terms, from April 10. It profiled seven local Catholic women who had diverse ways of making sense of their faith in our times. One of them sent so far as to replace "Our Father" with "Our Holy Mother" in saying the Lord's Prayer.

One agreed largely with Church teachings, subject to the proviso that the Church may one day be moved to ordain women, and was especially strong for the teaching against birth control.

One resented so much emphasis on "sex, abortion, birth control" and wanted more on "the war in Iraq, executions, far more serious problems." "The primacy of [individual] conscience," that one also felt, "has always been the essence of the Catholic Church."

And so on. Not exactly a rogue's gallery of "not real Catholics." So when Father railed from the lectern at them as a lead-in to telling us how important a strong, controlling pope is, I blanched. Upon further reflection today, I realize he was basically saying what the writer of a recent letter to the editor had in mind. (See "Priest shortage result of decline in moral values" on this page.)

The writer blamed the priest shortage in the Catholic Church on our loss as a society of:

... such things as absolute truth and absolute standards of good and evil, of right and wrong. Those are radical concepts in this day and age.

The shortage of priests in these United States is not a commentary on the church's refusal to discard ancient traditions and doctrine for the sake of expedience. It is more a commentary on us, on America - a commentary on what we've lost.

That boils down, in my mind, to a fear of change. For change endangers certainty, and the thing which unites all of the conservative voices I've mentioned in this post is that they all act as if they have been mugged by uncertainty.

Is that any way for people of faith to act?