Novus Ordo Seclorum

That Latin phrase, Novus Ordo Seclorum, appears on the back of the one dollar bill. Meaning "New World Order," it reflects the belief of the founders of the United States of America that their new nation put the world on a unprecedented and vital track.

Today, we hear echoes of Novus Ordo Seclorum in speechifying about what we are doing in the Middle East, in Iraq; in Afghanistan; and in the war against terrorism. President Bush the Father said his Gulf War coalition against Saddam Hussein reflected "a new world order," remember?

Connecting the affairs of one country, ours, with the order of the entire world is nothing new. It is the basis for American "exceptionalism." And that idea, our exceptionalism, is one of the major (if often unstated) bones of contention between those who support the war in Iraq and those who oppose it.

In fact, I think it is the decisive bone of contention.

I say this because I think no war could ever be more "faith-based" than this one in Iraq. What else can we say about a war whose two ostensible rationales, weapons of mass destruction and secret support by Iraq for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, turned out to be bogus? Whose author, President Bush the Son, switched by the time of his second inaugural to justifying his signature war in furtherance of world democracy? Whose supporters' "arguments" generally devolve upon lambasting opponents' patriotic resolve?

Not that the antiwar "arguments" are all that compelling. If you were asked to name one American who (a) holds any truly important elected office and (b) has spoken out unequivocally against the war, you'd be hard put to come up with one. Yes, we hear chafing about the war being "open-ended," with no terminus in sight. War opponents never tire of citing how many of our brave young men and women have died or been wounded to date. And when the insurgency in Iraq heats up, they're the first to wail and gnash their teeth. But as far as calling clearly and simply for our troops to come home now, we don't even get that from Howard Dean any more — if we ever did.

We hear from hawks that the Iraq war is really a chapter in the longer war on terror ... but without any real proof. From doves, we hear just the opposite, that there's no connection whatever ... again, without any real proof.

We hear from doves that the Afghanistan initiative was as justified as the Iraq one was not ... but we hear very little from doves or hawks about why we are still there.

There's considerable hand-wringing among doves over atrocities at Abu Ghraib and "Gitmo," while Administration hawks seem distressingly nonchalant. Meanwhile, neither side has done or said anything substantial to end the atrocities.

It's as if everybody's tongues are powerless to speak the whole truth. It's as if the whole truth cannot be spoken because it has not yet emerged. It's as if Bush's initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere are based 100% on faith in what that whole truth will be, when it finally does arrive.


So, yes, I've changed my mind about Iraq. I think Bush will be proven right. I say this as one whose instincts are profoundly dovish, as one who opposed the first Gulf War ... until we won it, that is. I was against the Vietnam War, back in the day. There hasn't been an American military action since I was knee-high to a grasshopper that I could get behind.

This one feels different. This one is so faith-based, it almost has to succeed.

As I have tried to make clear (see The Moral Arc of the Universe), I believe there is a heart-reality beneath our everyday eyes-reality. It is what arcs the cosmos, at the end of the day, toward justice. For the nonce, it is but a latency which we, acting at our most heroic, can help make true. Until it does come true, this heart-reality doesn't make a lot of sense ... except, of course, to our foolish hearts.

I believe the Bush war in Iraq, along with the other prime inititiaves on the world stage by which his administration will be judged, are heart-guided. They can't be justified by reason alone. They do not — for example, take the case of Iraq — always conform to the traditional Roman Catholic strictures for a just war.

In fact, I think it grows increasingly clear that those traditional strictures no longer serve. If only because this is not a declared war, and there may well never be another decleared American war, we have to redraw the guidelines.

A new, emergent world order — that is what we await today. One superpower, us, is acting exceptionally. Boldly, it is going against received, conventional wisdom to sow democracy where skeptics say it cannot grow. As it does so, it is generating "new world order" all the while.

American liberals and doves don't get it — or, if they get it, they don't like it. For them, the whole idea of American exceptionalism is bogus. No underlying heart-reality, no buried template of cosmic justice, requires this nation to act any differently from France or Switzerland, if that latent reality is to be brought to the surface.

I don't buy that. I think our nation's history is imbued with exceptionality. I think we have a special role to play, a heart-guided one that can't be pinned down by rules of the head.

Admittedly, I don't have all the answers to questions like, if that is so, what is to rein us in? How do we know as a body politic what is right, good, proper, and in accordance with the world's hidden heart-reality? Can Bush do no wrong?

No, I don't believe Bush can do no wrong. Make no mistake about that. But neither do I believe that the liberal shibboleths we hear today can guide us to the new world order I think God wants this country to usher in.


Though I say I've changed my mind, I have been edging toward this view for quite some time. It's mostly been a matter of some inchoate inner voice nagging at me, telling me to look beyond all the obvious reasons why this war is so seemingly without justification.

I have never felt comfortable — and still don't — with what Bush's neo-conservative minions say in support of their war, a litany of assertions which don't add up. In fact, it is the lack of real coherence in their official stances and positions which convinces me they are acting as much from faith as anything else. It's an "I know it's right, but I can't really say why" attitude that they convey, and I know it maddens liberals for just that reason.

But neither do I feel all warm and fuzzy about liberals' approach to this situation, to the sketchy extent that they have actually set one forth. Mostly all they say is "Bush was wrong to do this" and "Bush is misguided to do that."

It's as if both sides' base assumptions are inadequate to the new reality, which is bigger than the both of them. At least the Bush side is feeling its way along, meeting the situation that develops as best it can. When the history of all this is written, I expect Bush will in retrospect be congratulated for hewing as faithfully to his worldview as President Reagan did in standing up to the Soviet Union, precipitating its collapse. Remember how foolish Reagan looked to us liberals at the time?

The Moral Arc of the Universe

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker has this to say about the recent conviction of 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner some 41 years ago: justice has at long last been served. The ghosts of the three young men who were killed by Klansmen for registering Negroes to vote during Freedom Summer in 1964 had witnessed convictions of only seven of the eighteen men charged with their deaths ... until now, with the successful prosecution of the supposed minister of God who masterminded their slayings.

Tucker wraps up her column, which chastises all who today find Killen's prosecution inappropriate, by quoting the also-slain Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

No words could be more apt to my own worldview. I could not believe in God if I didn't believe there's a moral arc to the cosmos, bending it ever so slowly toward justice.

Nor could I believe in the moral arc if I did not believe in God. The two ideas are, in my mind, virtually synonymous.

More and more, I find that my belief in God says there are in effect two realities, one of which we perceive with our eyes and the other with our hearts. But the eyes-reality is, ultimately, false. In the end, the heart-reality will win.

The eyes-reality is the one which our egos attach themselves to, which is why, at bottom, Christianity is a matter of "crucifying the private ego" — see my thoughts on this phrase of Father Ron Rolheiser's in To Crucify the Ego (Part I) and To Crucify the Ego (Part II).

I would go so far as to say that every story of heroism — Dr. King's, Jesus's, ours — is fundamentally one in which the hero is led to abandon his everyday, practical, ego-identified reality and follow "the Force" toward justice, where justice is anything that reveals the heart-actuality beneath the "eyes" pseudo-reality.

Moderate Christian Soldiering

John Danforth is an Episcopal minister and former Republican U.S. senator from Missouri whose op-ed piece, Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers, appeared recently in The New York Times. In it, he speaks up on behalf of politically moderate Christians with strong religious convictions, such as myself:

Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth [Danforth writes], and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.

Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Here, then, Danforth exposes the crux of one of the most important debates of our time: the question of certainty.

Along those very lines, Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page has written this recent column. He points out that those whom he calls "sultans of certainty" were oh, so sure that Terri Schiavo was not all but dead, but might someday reawaken. Then, after her doctors arranged for her final demise at the behest of her husband and a sitting judge, an autopsy showed their certainty to have been misplaced.

Columnist Cal Thomas's Church, not state, must advance moral agenda actually supports one of Danforth's main points, that it's wrong for Evangelical conservatives to look to government to change people's hearts. This, even though Thomas is himself an Evangelical and a conservative. (Go figure!)

Yet I find that Thomas doesn't really get it. Danforth's dictum that "religion should be inclusive, and it should seek to bridge the differences that separate people" draws this response:

John Danforth seems to flirt with universalism when he says that he and his fellow religious moderates believe "religion should be inclusive." Not exactly. Different religions make competing claims and the Christian faith separates "sheep from goats," the saved from the lost, and heaven from hell.

"Competing claims" characterizes not just different religions, but the differences among all those who are nominally Christian ... not to mention the differences between atheists and those who believe in God. If, as Thomas does, we see this fact in the light of "Jesus said he came to bring a sword. A sword divides," then Danforth's reluctance to declare certainty on important issues can only be the road to perdition.

Or so it would be logical to conclude. We can't have it both ways, as Cal Thomas seems to want to do. It cannot possibly be enough to back off and stop trying to win the culture war through governmental and civic action. Those who call themselves Christians must also practice heartfelt tolerance. They must not, with Thomas, sniff:

[Jesus] told the woman taken in adultery that while he did not condemn her, she was to "go and sin no more." To a moderate, I guess that was intolerant.

No, Mr. Thomas, to a moderate that was tolerance personified. Which is the whole point. Today's Christians ought to be a lot more tolerant and forgiving than they are ... and a lot less certain that they alone have the final answer to everything.

Feeling the Force

In To Crucify the Ego (Part II) and its predecessor, To Crucify the Ego (Part I), I discussed Fr. Ron Rolhesier's contention that the true message of Christ's cross — love — implies we ought each to (in his phrase) "crucify our private ego."

In the World According to Rolheiser, Jesus, who is "the paragon of mature human love," through his redeeming death on a cross teaches us that love:

... lies at the base of everything, the cosmic, the biological, the emotional, the psychological, the sexual, the spiritual. There is no level of reality where one doesn't see the relentless deep pull inside of all things towards a unity, community, fusion, and oneness beyond self. Love stirs all things, speaking to every element in the language it can understand. Deep inside of us, we know too that this alone can bring us home.

In Star Wars, love is the Force that guides us aright when we "let go" of our ego and its mandate to control everything.


One of the things which fascinates me about Rolheiser's worldview, accordingly, is that it's really no different from that of Star Wars, or any other hero epic for that matter.

Take Lord of the Rings. Frodo Baggins, a mere Hobbit, leaves the comfortable Shire under extreme duress and takes a hero's journey in search of the Crack of Doom, the unique place where he can destroy the One Ring, the epitome of power. Evil Sauron, who, à la Darth Vader, epitomizes George Lucas's "Dark Side of the Force," wants Frodo's Ring as well, and the Ring wants to go to Sauron. Which side will win?

The Force is powerful, but so is the Dark Side. The Dark Side tempts even Frodo to wear the Ring and claim its power.

Unqualified, the Force represents (in Rolheiser's lingo) the "crucifixion" of the private ego. Qualified by the term "the Dark Side," accordingly, the Force represents what happens when the resurgent ego co-opts the Force's power to do good. When Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker turns into Sith Darth Vader, his ego has experienced what might be called the demonic parody of Christ's resurrection.


This would seem to be a universal message, this neverending story of the ego's crucifixion in hero after hero — Parsifal, King Arthur, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca, Spiderman, you and me (sometimes) — with Christ the paragon of all heroes.

So the question I have is this: if we all respond so deeply to messages of love, ego-crucifixion, and heroism like these, why isn't it more widely understood that Christ is the paragon of all heroes?

When I was a college freshman at Georgetown University, where most students are Catholic, my "Introduction to Psychology" professor, Fr. Juan B. Cortés, a Jesuit, asked the class the first time we met to think of the name of a hero. He called on several students, whose answers varied ... but no one named Jesus. This fact Fr. Cortés commented on at some length, for the point of the exercise was exactly that something in the modern psyche, as it has developed, misses that Christ could conceivably be the Hero among Heroes.

That was in 1965. Twelve years later, the first Star Wars movie came out. I never made any connection then between the Force and the Gospel message.

Some ten years after that, my life took a turn, and for the first time I got religious. At about the same time, I imbibed Joseph Campbell's PBS series, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. Many of the points I've just made about heroism and the Force came to me courtesy of the late myth guru, Campbell. But Campbell identified Jesus with the Buddha — also a hero, yes, but the Buddha-Jesus link obscured (at least for me) Rolheiser's point about the cross.

To wit, it is the paradigm of all heroism.

To Crucify the Ego (Part II)

In To Crucify the Ego (Part I) I suggested that the open-yet-hidden significance of Christ's cross is that reality is surprisingly constituted. Instead of the royal road to metaphysical harmony being either of those imaginable extremes, self-glorification or self-mortification, a Middle Path exists. It is the path Father Ron Rolheiser calls "the crucifixion of the private ego."

In his article The Jesus Code - Unravelling The Secret, Fr. Rolheiser shows that the link between Jesus's crucifixion and that of our individual private egos has to do with each one of us coming to understand "the deepest mystery within the universe," namely, love:

It lies at the base of everything, the cosmic, the biological, the emotional, the psychological, the sexual, the spiritual. There is no level of reality where one doesn't see the relentless deep pull inside of all things towards a unity, community, fusion, and oneness beyond self. Love stirs all things, speaking to every element in the language it can understand. Deep inside of us, we know too that this alone can bring us home.

"Slowly, painfully, with many setbacks, over the course of a lifetime," Rolheiser says, we crack the inner code of love — its secret DNA, as it were.

And "the paragon of mature human love," says Rolheiser, was Jesus's "refusing to resort to any kind of superior physical power to overwhelm his adversaries, refusing to give back in kind, and refusing to give himself over to bitterness and cynicism."

Rather, "innocent, trusting, unwilling out of love to protect himself against suffering," Jesus was intent on "absorbing hatred and sin, understanding and forgiving those who were murdering him." Through his selfless heroism he saved us.

Thus does the cross of Christ present us with a paradigm for our personal heroism, the crucifixion of our own private egos.

It's hard to know exactly what that could mean: to crucify the ego.

I think it means something relating to the fact that we humans are unique in having self-awareness, the knowledge of "I-ness." After all, ego in Latin is the first-person singular pronoun, the one that means "I."

Psychologists speak of the ego as something that develops in our infancy. It's an aspect of the psyche that lets us negotiate a complex world as we preserve our own existence and identity. It's a lot more than just having a swelled head. And it's not necessarily "bad."

But it can make us selfish, blinding us to the importance of those people and things that don't necessarily help us get along in life.

The prerogatives of the ego within the ambit of the total human psyche turn out to be limited, short-sighted, and biased. When the ego is running things, we easily find ourselves thrown out of inner — not to mention outer — harmony and peace.

This fact, that doing all the "sensible" things that further our private interests and feather our own nests is not the royal road to happiness, makes no sense whatever to the ego-dominated human mentality.

That's why, I suspect, we need to undergo a "religious" experience to help us "crucify" our private egos. The "meaning" of Christ's cross and its messages of love from above and of our own love for our fellow beings makes sense in this light. We need to experience some sort of radical conversion, a spiritual "attitude adjustment," if our egos are ever going to be "crucified."

To Crucify the Ego (Part I)

Fr. Ron Rolheiser

The Jesus Code - Unravelling The Secret, a recent column by Father Ron Rolheiser, comes as close as anything I've read to encapsulating in a few short paragraphs what the Christian religion is all about.

Fr. Rolheiser is a Catholic priest and president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He writes a weekly column, available online and via various Catholic newspapers such at The Catholic Review here in Baltimore, MD. (Access Fr. Rolheiser's column archives here.) On a consistent basis, I find his pieces unusually insightful. This piece is especially so.

In it, Rolheiser plays on the human need to crack secret codes to find the hidden wisdom buried within — as evidenced by all the recent interest in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. Rolheiser says the code of codes of our human lives is "the Jesus Code."

"Jesus makes it very clear that there is a hidden, secret wisdom," Rolheiser writes of the Gospel of St. Mark, "that needs to be grasped if one is to understand the deep design of things. What is it?"

(Maybe not everyone would like to "grasp the deep design of things," but many of us do. I'd place my own self in this company quite readily.)

Well, according to Rolheiser, the "whole life and mission" of the Jesus of the Gospel stories "are an attempt to lay open for everyone the deepest secret of all and to make that secret accessible to everyone, as accessible as the nearest water tap or the village well. Since Jesus, the deepest secret is an open secret. What is it?"


What is it, indeed? Rolheiser says it's the "code" that's "hidden in the cross of Christ," the one "we have to break open if we are to learn the deep secrets of life. The cross contains a wisdom, the wisdom of the crucified, which is a prism through which all else is to be viewed."

What is it, this "open secret" that "love is most truly revealed in the brokenness of Jesus on the cross?"

What is it? It's that

... there is a necessary connection between certain things: Isn't a certain prior suffering and humiliation always the condition for glory? Don't we all, like Cinderella, first have to sit in the ashes before the glass slipper will fit our feet? Isn't sublimation always the means to the sublime? Isn't it precisely when we are vulnerable and unable to impress or overpower others that we are finally open to intimacy, love, and family? Aren't self-sacrifice and self-denial, in the end, the way real love manifests itself?

"Isn't the crucifixion of the private ego the route to empathy and community?" Rolheiser adds. "Isn't the forgiveness of those who hurt us the final manifestation of human maturity?"

I find that phrase, "the crucifixion of the private ego," to be the real nugget of wisdom here. One of its most important synonyms is the one Fr. Rolheiser gives in the next sentence: "the forgiveness of those who hurt us." It is the canonical synonym, even, because outright forgiveness is the hardest sacrifice we ever have to make. But I'd say there are clearly other synonyms, too.

In fact, I'd go so far to say that everything that we do that's good at least hints at the crucifixion of the private ego, and everything we do that's bad at least hints at its nemesis: the private ego's glorification.

"Glory" without "prior suffering and humiliation": isn't that what the ego is always interested in? The secret wisdom of Christ's cross is that that's an impossibility, even an oxymoron.

Now, I'm no angel. I don't want to claim that the crucifixion of my own personal private ego has actually taken place — nothing of the kind. I don't have any special handle on goodness. My inner sense, furthermore, is that my ego is usually firmly in charge of my affairs. Most of the time, I'm far from a saint.

Even so, I find that Fr. Rolheiser's concept of the crucifixion of the private ego as the open-yet-hidden message of Christ's cross resonates deeply with me. I'd like to explore some of the reasons why.

One of the first things that comes to mind when I contemplate the notion of ego crucifixion is the worry that it's an invitation to a life of self-flagellation. Some people assiduously seek their own self-mortification. Can this be right?

Jesus, though, was not a self-flagellator; no self-mortifier he. In Matthew 26, Jesus's prayer in Gethsemene in preparation for his betrayal and death included the words, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" (v. 39 KJV). I have always wondered about this prayer. Under the assumption that Jesus was God and privy to the sheer, ineluctable necessity of the events that were about to take place, what possible sense could his "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" make?

It makes sense, I'd say, only in the context of revealing his nature as a non-self-mortifier, one who does not have an inner urge to self-destruction. Ergo, ego crucifixion, like Jesus's own crucifixion, is not a rationalization of suicide.

Hence, the ego crucifixion which Fr. Rolheiser speaks of is a sort of Middle Way (see also the earlier post The Middle Way: No To Sithhood). It is a path that lies somewhere between the two extremes of self-glorification and self-mortification. The fact that it is a Middle Path is one of the reasons the concept of ego crucifixion resonates deeply with me.

The Middle Way: No To Sithhood

Statue of Standing Buddha

The Buddha extolled the Middle Way or Middle Path as always best, by which he basically meant "the practice of non-extremism."

Specifically, according to Wikipedia, the Buddha chose "a path of moderation away from the extremes of self-indulgence and opposing self-mortification. Gautama [Buddha] found the middle way after experiencing extremes — he renounced his luxurious royal family life and became an ascetic before attaining Enlightenment."

I'd like to think that I too, though no Buddha, am inclined to look for the Middle Way in all things.


This has relevance in the context of a "debate" which can be constructed between two recent opinion columns. From the right comes "In Defense of Certainty," an essay by Charles Krauthammer in the June 6, 2005, TIME. From the left — or, actually, is it the middle? — we have Clarence Page with his May 25, 2005, op-ed piece "'Darth Bush'?".

Krauthammer has it that the liberal secularists among us have launched a "campaign against certainty," their thinly disguised way to oppose "unseemly religiosity" among President Bush's judicial nominees and others.

Though Krauthammer admits that he himself is "not much of a believer," in any religious sense, clearly the columnist holds "deeply held views" concerning "moral certainty" in the abstract. To wit, he favors it.

Page is not so sure. He worries that the desire for moral certainty paves the way for dictators, à la the recent Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith movie.

To understand what Page is on about, it helps to read Baltimore Sun movie critic Michael Sragow's review of the movie, "Jedi Masterful", in which Sragow says "you witness with understanding as well as horror the desire for certainty that transforms the Republic into an evil Empire."

The film documents the turning of the good Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker into the dark lord Darth Vader. Anakin loves Padme Amidala, a princess who is his secret wife. His "fear of Padme's death, which he sees in a prophetic vision, reflects his emotional greed and irrational urge for control." That, in turn,

.... makes him vulnerable to the Dark Side [of the Force] and to the manipulations of Chancellor Palpatine, his friend. Palpatine takes on ever-more dictatorial powers, promising peace and stability to the Republic (and to Anakin, the power to save Padme). In effect Palpatine says he will destroy the Republic to save it -- and in the shrinking circle of Jedi and uncorrupted Senators like Padme and [certain others], only Anakin accepts his word.

So the Jedi knight becomes the evil Sith. It is Anakin's conversion to the Dark Side, out of his all-too-human need for certainty and control, which brings on the Evil Empire. "The whole movie is about," writes Sragow, "the difficulty of steering a true course when a galaxy is in turbulence."

Here's Page's own synopsis of what's at stake in the film:

"If you're not with me, you're my enemy," declares Anakin Skywalker as he drifts over to the "dark side" morphing into the evil Lord Darth Vader and echoing [President] Bush's warning "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Ouch.

Anakin's mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, retorts: "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." Double ouch.

Bad-guy Chancellor Palpatine exploits war fears to consolidate his power, suspend democratic rule and turn the Republic into a dictatorship. It's not hard to hear echoes here of Congress' rush to pass the USA Patriot Act that expanded government search and eavesdropping powers after the Sept. 11 attacks. Padme Amidala ... laments, "This is how liberty dies: with thundering applause." Triple ouch.

"Only a Sith thinks in absolutes," if true, would make the likes of Charles Krauthammer, along with President Bush, most of his administration, and many of his supporters, Siths.

If one thinks in absolutes, one cannot find the middle way. The middle way lies between two extremes which, at first blush, seem to exhaust all possibilities and present us with an ineluctable either-or choice. At first, no third way, no middle path, is evident. There just seem to be the two opposed absolutes, one of which is perforce good and the other of which is evil. Make your choice.

The middle way is the way of creation. One creates it as much as finds it. It's the secret door in every fantasy story, the one which isn't apparently there to begin with, and if discovered can't be opened without the right incantation.

Often, it takes the naivete of a child to know what to do. Star Wars creator George Lucas represents the creative power of supposedly childish intuition in the first film of the series, Episode IV—A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker, at the climactic moment, hears Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice telling him to "Feel the Force, Luke!" Luke turns off the high-tech guidance system of his space fighter-bomber and uses his intuition to guide him to his target.

But Krauthammer and his ilk have a different definition of Force: That Which Militates Against Uncertainty. The pundit waxes nostalgic for the post-9/11 shock and awe, when our first instinct was to name an enemy and lash back, as one, in any way we could:

Do you remember 9/11? How you felt? The moral clarity of that day and the days thereafter? Just days after 9/11, on this very page, [TIME essayist] Lance Morrow wrote a brilliant, searing affirmation of right against wrong, good against evil.

For one brief, shining moment, a reeling America was heavy into control and certainty, unity and uniformity. We ought to return to that spirit, Krauthammer says. Thus, in the Krauthammer worldview, it is wrong for us to leave abortion decisions in the uncertain hands of individual women. Wrong to keep a high wall of separation between church and state, making God's status among us less than certain. Wrong to question our president's own moral cocksureness in waging his war in Iraq.

I'll certainly never expect to encounter Charles Krauthammer on the Middle Path!