The following essay is adapted from the Epilogue of my new book, The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders. An overview of the book’s argument from the Washington Post can be read here, while an excerpt from a different section of the book—on the right’s nostalgia for a vanished consensus on sexual traditionalism—can be read here at the wonderful cultural webzine The Utopian.

For the better part of the past twenty-five-hundred years, the political imagination of the Western world has been enchanted by an image of communal unity. The image emerged from the experience of life in the city-states of the ancient world, where philosophers suggested that a political community is a collective enterprise animated by a comprehensive vision of the highest human good—and that the content of this vision is determined by the individuals, families, factions, or classes that rule the community. Over the centuries, the image grew more elaborate. At some points, the community was described as a “ship of state” commanded by a brave and virtuous captain; at other times, it was a “body politic” whose head wisely guides the motions of its limbs. But in every case, the image conveyed the view that politics is a contest over who will win the honor of standing at the center of a political community, serving as the part that fundamentally shapes its character as a whole.

The first liberals, writing in the bloody aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, broke from this assumption, treating disagreement and discord about the highest good as a given and then proposed that civil peace in a deeply divided society could best be established and maintained by excluding as much as possible the most divisive questions—metaphysical questions—from political life. Citizens would still have strongly held views about the highest good, but they would no longer presume that their neighbors or the political community as a whole would collectively endorse those views. Instead of articulating the community’s shared vision of metaphysical truths, politics would focus on the more mundane task of securing the (economic and social) preconditions of individuals and groups pursuing the highest good, however they happened to define it.

Perhaps the most famous example of this liberal orientation can be found in the Declaration of Independence and its ringing invocation of a natural right of individuals to pursue happiness. The document’s silence about the content of happiness and about what actions or ways-of-life are conducive to happiness would have been unthinkable in earlier forms of political thinking. But for a political liberal like Thomas Jefferson, the silence was an unavoidable outgrowth of the lack of a sufficient consensus regarding humanity’s highest ends. Where such a consensus is lacking, it is foolish to expect more from politics—to expect the state to articulate and enforce a single, comprehensive notion of the highest good. Far from restoring the sense of spontaneous unity and shared meaning we like to see in pre-liberal forms of political life, such efforts would inevitably end up using state power to impose the values and beliefs of one part of a deeply divided community on its other parts.

But liberalism doesn’t just provide tools that make it possible for a society to manage pluralism. Once individuals and groups are granted the freedom to pursue the good as they wish, unburdened by the threat of political coercion, the political community becomes even more pluralistic than it already was—and in different ways than it already was. Visions of the highest good proliferate, setting individuals and groups off in different directions, pursuing happiness along divergent paths. In such a society, pluralism even seeps into individual lives, creating new, multifaceted forms of personal identity as well as a wide array of interwoven, rule-based social relationships. Six days a week my mailman delivers mail to my home—not because of his benevolence or public spiritedness, but because he abides by the rules of his job. But at the same time, those rules do not fundamentally define him; the task of delivering the mail is merely a part of his life—merely one aspect of his identity. He may also be a devoted husband and father of two young children, a lapsed Catholic, an avid football fan, a member of the town council, an occasional bowler, a staunch Republican, an ex-Deadhead, a regular and enthusiastic viewer of Top Chef, a proud third-generation Italian American, and so forth, through all of the disparate goods he pursues in the multiple aspects of his private and public lives. Each of these aspects and each of these pursuits tell us something about his identity, but none of them should be confused with its essence, with its core, with who he is as a whole, which is somehow the totality of these various aspects and pursuits, and their complicated interrelations—just as a liberal society is somehow the totality of the various pursuits of every individual within it.

What is it, finally, that divides the believer from the atheist? The question comes to mind in observing renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens endure, in full public view, metastatic esophageal cancer. In a remarkable Vanity Fair column, then in an interview with the vapid Anderson Cooper on CNN, and once again in a videotaped interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hitchens has movingly described his condition, his experience of chemotherapy, and many other aspects of his illness.

But the statements that have sparked the greatest discussion are the ones in which Hitchens declares that those religious believers who hope he will undergo a deathbed conversion are bound to be disappointed. Any such conversion, if it happened, would be the product of a brain consumed by cancer and a body wracked by pain. It should not be taken seriously, in other words, as a genuine expression of the beliefs and desires of the man known as Christopher Hitchens. It should instead be dismissed as the deluded ramblings of someone driven out of his right mind by suffering and disease. And the statements of a man in such a state tell us nothing worth knowing, either about him or about God.

Hitchens would be gratified to know that his comments reminded me of a writer we both revere: Holocaust-survivor Primo Levi. More specifically, Hitchens’ statements reminded me of how, during my time working for the theoconservative journal First Things, a devoutly Christian colleague reacted to a passage of Levi’s that I had admired for years as an incomparably powerful expression of stoicism, courage, and integrity.

Here is Levi, from The Drowned and the Saved:

I entered the Lager (Auschwitz) as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation; I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.

When I referred to this passage in the First Things offices, my pious colleague reacted with visible disdain, which he conveyed in the following way: In his fear and trembling before annihilation, Levi felt for the first time in his life the call of God. And how did he respond to this call? By refusing it. And why? Because it would have embarrassed him. Far from being admirable, the statement was an almost demonic expression of the deadly sin (and singularly Christian vice) of pride.

So a Christian considers pride a sin and a (Jewish) atheist does not. That’s hardly news. But my colleague’s—and Levi’s, and Hitchens’—positions were actually about more than this. At a deeper level they were about anthropology and what be called the epistemology of religious truth.

In their statements, Levi and Hitchens imply that a person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself. This is the outlook of the scientist (Levi was a chemist), the philosopher, the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic. From this standpoint, the terrified, irrational effusions of a man facing his own extinction are no more to be trusted than a blind man’s account of a crime scene: each witness lacks the capacity to perceive, make sense of, and accurately judge the essential facts. Far more reliable are the sober, critical reflections of a man in good health, protected from danger, insulated from threats to his well being. That, for Levi and Hitchens, is a man at his best and most capable of determining the truth of things.

Religious believers—including my devoutly religious colleague at First Things—make very different assumptions about the proper path to truth and what constitutes a man at his best. As Rod Dreher noted in a post about Hitchens’ recent statements, a Christian believes that the experience of suffering discloses essential truths that cannot be discovered or known in any other way. What are these truths? That we are fundamentally weak and needy creatures. That we are anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of our worries. That we greedily crave good things for ourselves—many of which (fame, fortune, honor, glory) only the luckiest will ever acquire, and some of which (happiness unmixed with sorrow) no one will ever enjoy within the limits of our finite lives.

For the religious person, human beings are at their best when they accept these truths and live humbly in their light, offering up their existential anguish as prayers, opening themselves up to the possible existence of a providential divinity who will answer those prayers and grant salvation from the horror of obliteration. Human beings are at their worst, by contrast, when they deny the fact of their frailty, deluding themselves into believing in their self-sufficiency. (This is where the critique of pride comes in.)

Levi and Hitchens reside in the first camp, believing that they are most themselves when they are healthy and free—at the height of their human powers; whatever they may feel or say (or be tempted to say) in moments of weakness or degradation deserves to be dismissed as inauthentic. But the devout reside in the second camp, insisting that human beings are truest to themselves—most authentic—when they are most vulnerable.

Which of them is right? That is perhaps the most pressing human question—and the one that points to what might be the deepest, most intractable division between the believer and the atheist.

My old friend (and antagonist on gay marriage) Rod Dreher has a new blog at the outstanding new web-magazine of the John Templeton Foundation, which goes by the supremely Templetonian title of Big Questions Online (BQO). I recommend a visit.

While you’re there, I urge you to take a look at Rod’s inaugural post from last week, in which he responds to an artfully executed and deeply troubling cover story in a recent issue of New York magazine about (to quote the article’s subtitle) “why parents hate parenting.” The article’s author Jennifer Senior proposes, first, that parents hate parenting because it gets in the way of their pursuit of happiness and, second, that this means that today’s parents need to develop a richer understanding of happiness—one that is compatible with the struggles and sacrifices involved in parenting and that conceives of fulfillment in terms of leading a “productive, purposeful life.” (The quotation comes from Martin Seligman, the founder of “positive psychology”—and father of seven children.)

In response, Rod takes the suggestion for reform a step further to distinguish between happiness and joy: “Happiness is a superficial and fragile thing; joy is happiness that has been deepened and refined by tragedy. Joy is happiness with dimension. Joy is what you have that tells you that the burden is light, the yoke is freedom.”

There’s certainly truth in that. Though I fear that Rod is staying within the conceptual universe that leads so many parents—or rather, so many of the early twenty-first-century, upper-middle-class, professional, secular, American parents highlighted in the New York magazine article—to view parenting as such an unhappy burden.

That conceptual universe is a Kantian one in which individuals find themselves torn between fundamentally incompatible, antagonistic ways of living. On one side are selfish inclinations: the pursuit of one’s own good; physical, emotional, sensual, and intellectual pleasure-seeking; financial rewards; satisfaction and fulfillment of personal ambition in a successful career. On the other side are selfless moral duties—very much including obligations to the good of others, including one’s children. We pursue the first kinds of actions because we directly benefit from them; we pursue the second because we feel obliged to do so, regardless of whether they benefit us, and even if they are likely to injure or harm us. Life’s delights flow from the first group, its moral gravity grows out of the second.

The parents interviewed in the New York article invariably view the world and their lives in these starkly divided, Kantian terms—and that’s a major source of their misery. As Nietzsche so memorably explained, this outlook (which ultimately derives from Protestant Christianity) divides us against ourselves. We can’t help but want to be happy, but pursuing happiness to the exclusion of our parental duties makes us feel worthless. Fulfilling our duties, by contrast, gives us a sense of self-worth, but it also feels like endless drudgery—a marathon of miserable chores—that keeps us from what we’d rather be doing, which is selfishly pursuing happiness. So we become grumpy, testy, irritable with our children, who can seem like a burden custom-made to inhibit our enjoyment of life. And that, in turn, inspires bouts of guilt as we berate ourselves for our selfishness—and end up consumed by envy and resentment of childless friends and colleagues, all the while working to convince ourselves that our noble sacrifices make us better people.

Round and round we go, careening between the poles of happiness and anger, pride and self-loathing. Rod (like Jennifer Senior) is right to pine for a different, less psychologically immiserating model of parenting. But is “joy” enough? I’m afraid not—at least if all it means is that parents begin to view the “yoke” of raising children as “freedom.” To my ear that sounds like a typically Kantian (and Protestant) attempt to avoid the problem by inverting it with a healthy dose of sophistry: Obedience is autonomy! Slavery is freedom! Death is life! If parenting is a yoke, then no matter how much we try to prettify it, it will be a heavy, uncomfortable constraint. It will be a burden—and avoiding it or leaving it behind will be a benefit.

Better are passages of Rod’s post and the original article that gesture toward a radically different view of human happiness—one that takes its cue not from Kant but from Aristotle. In the Aristotelian tradition of moral thinking, human beings don’t face a zero-sum choice between fulfillment and moral righteousness. They strive, instead, to fulfill a holistic vision of human flourishing that includes both happiness and nobility. Or rather, this vision of human flourishing treats happiness as inseparable from nobility. This is what Martin Seligman and the best of his colleagues in the positive psychology movement have in mind when they speak of the importance of “purpose” in a fulfilling human life. A life spent in endless pursuit of egoistic self-satisfaction (Kant’s vision of corruption) would end in wretched desolation, but so would a life devoted purely to acts of exalted self-sacrifice (Kant’s moral ideal). A genuinely purposeful life, by contrast, is one in which an individual strives to become a good human being in the fullest sense—contented as much by work, career, and material reward as by devoting oneself to the flourishing of one’s children.

(A philosophical footnote: As he worked to refine his moral theory, Kant became increasingly aware of the need to supplement it with an account of purposefulness. The result was The Critique of Judgment, the last and most obscure of his three monumental “Critiques” [which followed the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason]. Though there is much of interest in the book, nearly everyone considers it a disappointment. The effort to rectify its defects among Kant’s contemporaries led very quickly to the philosophical systems of the German Idealists [Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel]. That I have turned back to Aristotle instead of toward the various solutions proposed by Kant’s successors in this tradition should be taken as an indication that I consider their systems to be glorious failures. For two very different accounts of how German Idealism grows out of Kant’s third Critique, see the work of Susan Shell and Robert Pippin.)

How could Aristotelian purposiveness be cultivated in practice? It’s a difficult question—one I can’t hope to answer in a blog post. Though I will say that I suspect that conservative Aristotelians such as Alasdair McIntyre are wrong to assume that a vision of happiness as human flourishing needs to be grounded in biblical religion. After all, Aristotle himself developed his account of morality without reference to biblical revelation, simply by sorting through and refining the contradictory moral opinions of his fellow Greek pagans. If it worked for him, why couldn’t it be adapted for the early twenty-first-century, upper-middle-class, professional, secular, American pagans who find themselves trapped in a degraded moral landscape bequeathed to them by Protestant Christianity and a prudish professor of philosophy from eighteenth-century Prussia?

Stranger things have happened.

The characteristic of the American journalist consists in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of his readers; he abandons principles to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life and disclose all their weaknesses and vices.

A description of Andrew Breitbart’s consistently scummy contributions to our public discourse? A reaction to ideological strategizing among the members of the liberal listserve Journolist? Hardly. The quotation comes from the first volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, published in 1835. The passage is useful because it reminds us of something we tend to forget in the midst of our moralistic posturing about Journalistic Ideals, the rise of groupthink, and the descent of the media into rumor-mongering trash talk. What we forget is that extreme partisanship and vulgar advocacy on the part of journalists is nothing new in the United States. It is, on the contrary, the historic norm.

When Tocqueville visited the young United States in 1831, the press consisted almost entirely of partisan broadsheets. The political commitments of each paper’s publisher were obvious in nearly every story. Politicians and citizens on the same side received favorable coverage while opponents were regularly savaged with a viciousness that rivals our most rabid bloggers. There were Democratic newspapers and Whig newspapers, pro-slavery and anti-slavery newspapers, and so forth, through all the major issues of the day.

Not until the heyday of Progressivism in the 1910s did writers begin to advocate an ideal of objectivity for the press, and not until the years following the Second World War did major newspapers and magazines begin to uphold with any consistency that standard in the newsroom while relegating political opinion to the editorial page. By the middle of the twentieth century, reporters were expected to strive for neutrality, compiling a litany of unbiased facts that were presented to readers who would then discharge their civic duties by making political decisions in their light. It truly was the high tide of postwar liberalism.

But when it comes to journalism, it seems, our future is our past. Where there were a few hundred newspapers in the 1830s, today there are thousands of political bloggers, each of them vying for attention and influence by screaming into computer-amplified megaphones. The numbers are greater and the medium is different, but the style is the same: libelous exaggeration and furious passions rule the day, every day, on every side of every public dispute, drowning out the few who resist choosing sides and joining the partisan battle.

As he did with nearly everything he observed in the United States, Tocqueville traced the rancorous character of American journalism to the character of American democracy (by which he largely meant our commitment to the principle of equality). In a country where citizens actively deny, in the name of equality, that any public institution possesses the authority to determine the community’s common good, the battle among individuals and groups over competing civic visions will be fierce.

Viewed in the light of this history, the middle years of the twentieth century were the exception—the years when high-minded journalists managed for a few decades to set themselves up as a recognized public authority in the United States, empowered to act as arbiters of opinion and the country’s common good. But it couldn’t last—and not only because the ideal of objectivity could never be perfectly realized. It couldn’t last, above all, because the democratic convictions of American citizens make them especially receptive to the claim they are being unjustly ruled—that all authority is arbitrary authority.

And so here we are: Once-great institutions of journalism—the one-time gatekeepers of political opinion-making—in financial free-fall and writers on both sides of the aisle outdoing themselves in a contest to see how slanted they can be in the presentation and analysis of the news. Welcome home, America.

Rand Paul’s touching (and temporary) display of honesty on the Rachel Maddow show last week has triggered an enormous amount of criticism. Liberals and progressives have denounced as morally offensive Paul’s constitutional concerns about certain provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Conservatives, meanwhile, have taken to ridiculing Paul as a political novice who doesn’t know when to compromise his principles for the sake of expediency. But what Paul’s remarks really demonstrate is not that he’s too principled, but rather that the particular principles he’s set out to defend—the principles underlying libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement—are absurdly one-sided.

Speaking broadly, modern government moves between two poles, each of which has a seventeenth-century thinker as its champion, and each of which is focused on minimizing a particular form of injustice. On one side is Thomas Hobbes, who defended the creation of an authoritarian government as the only viable means of protecting certain individuals and groups from injustices perpetrated by other individuals and groups. On the other side is John Locke, who advocated a minimal state in order to protect individuals and groups against injustices perpetrated by governments themselves. Taken to an extreme, the Hobbesian pole leads to totalitarianism, while the Lockean pole terminates in the quasi-anarchism of the night watchman state.

Aside, perhaps, from the pretty thoroughly Hobbesian state of North Korea, every functional government in the world mixes elements of each of these pure forms—and partisan disputes within nations can often be reduced to conflicts over how Hobbesian or Lockean the state should be on a given issue. There are endless examples. Should health care be delivered by the state, by private entities, or by some mixture of the two? How much should the state regulate the market, and in what areas? And as Rand Paul has recently reminded us: Should racist business owners be free to treat black Americans as second-class citizens? Or should the federal government forbid such discrimination? In each case, to favor government action is to lean toward Hobbes; to oppose it is to favor Locke.

What makes Rand Paul’s position (as he originally expressed it on the Maddow show) noteworthy is that it’s a pure, unadulterated expression of Lockean anti-statism with little admixture of Hobbesian sentiments at all. Paul, like many libertarians and Tea Party activists, is so obsessed with the possibility that the state might commit an injustice that he’s indifferent to the reality of actually existing injustice at the hands of private citizens. As far as these radical Lockeans are concerned, the former is tyranny, pure and simple, while the latter is just life: yeah, it’s sometimes unfair, but freedom requires that we (or rather, in this case, blacks living under Jim Crow in the South) get over it.

But the reason why politics normally takes place in the messy middle between Hobbes and Locke—between the maximal and the minimal state—is that most of us don’t get over it. We recognize that both thinkers have a point. Decent politics—properly liberal politics—involves the attempt to combat both forms of injustice in full awareness that seeking to eradicate one form will often produce an increase in the other. The distinctive glory and pathos of liberal politics can be found in the endless effort to achieve and maintain precisely this precarious balance.

Those who give up on that effort and seek instead to realize one notion of justice to the exclusion of the other are history’s political mischief-makers. When untempered by Lockean considerations, the pursuit of Hobbesian justice justifies tyranny in the name of moral righteousness. It is thus a serious danger and a potent threat to civilized life and human freedom. The single-minded pursuit of Lockean justice, by contrast, with its paranoia about imagined wrongs and relative indifference to expressions of actual human suffering, is merely callously ridiculous. But as Rand Paul has helpfully reminded us, it is a form of ridiculousness to which Americans tend to be inordinately tempted. 

About 2-1/2 years ago I wrote an essay for TNR in which I criticized the so-called new atheists (primarily Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens). A few months later, I followed up with a critical take on Bill Maher’s Religulous. In both cases, my focus was politics. There was, I argued, something deeply illiberal about the new atheists’ intolerant hostility to the spiritual beliefs of their fellow citizens. I still believe that, as readers of my forthcoming book will discover. But the more I read and ponder the writings of the new atheists, the more I find myself rejecting them for more fundamental reasons.

To explain why, let me direct your attention to a recent post by Kevin Drum in response to a powerful essay by theologian David B. Hart. (For a note on my complicated history with Hart, see here.) Hart’s essay irritatedly dismissed the new atheists for two defects: First, they show no sign of confronting and wrestling with (or even understanding) the most serious philosophical arguments of the Christian theological tradition; second, they show an almost complete lack of awareness of all that was gained (culturally and morally) by the advent of Christianity and seem blithely unconcerned about what would be lost (again, culturally and morally) were it to vanish from the world.

In response, Drum dismisses, and mocks, Hart’s own attempt to sketch a more philosophically adequate and rigorous account of God than the new atheists typically engage with. And that leads to the core of my problem with Drum and the rest of the new atheists. Toward the end of his post, Drum responds to Hart’s efforts to highlight the positive influence of Christianity by writing that “to say merely that Christianity is comforting or practical—assuming you believe that—is hardly enough. You need to show that it's true.” Now, this seems to be exactly what Hart was attempting to do in the very passages of his essay that Drum dismissed and mocked. But let’s leave that aside.

What’s most disappointing is Drum’s failure to grasp the culminating point of Hart’s essay, which, as I take it, is this: the statements “godlessness is true” and “godlessness is good” are distinct propositions. And yet the new atheists invariably conflate them. But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart’s view) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that “unconditional, honest atheism is ... the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible.

Now of course Hart would prefer that kind of tragic atheism. He’s a believer, after all. But the fact is that a number of atheists themselves have staked out a similar position. Take the example of physicist Steven Weinberg. In his 1977 book about the earliest origins of the universe (The First Three Minutes), Weinberg stated in passing that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” When some of his fellow cosmologists objected to the choice of words, accusing him of expressing, if only implicitly, some form of theological nostalgia for a non-scientific view of the world, Weinberg admitted that he is indeed nostalgic—“nostalgic for a world in which the heavens declared the glory of God.” Associating himself with the nineteenth-century poet Matthew Arnold, who likened the retreat of religious faith in the face of scientific progress to the ebbing ocean tide and claimed to detect a “note of sadness” in its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” Weinberg confessed to his own sorrow in doubting that scientists will find “in the laws of nature a plan prepared by a concerned creator in which human beings played some special role.” When it comes to God, what Weinberg believes to be true and what he wishes to be true simply do not coincide.

Nietzsche and Weinberg are hardly the only catastrophic atheists. Poet Philip Larkin thoroughly rejected belief in God while also recognizing that a life lived in the glaring light of “the sure extinction that we travel to” could be nearly unbearable at times. Playwright Eugene O’Neill seems to have thought that a life stripped of all illusions, including theological illusions, would be intolerable, plunging us into despair and madness. And then there is the rather extreme case of Woody Allen.

The point is not that atheism must invariably terminate in a tragic view of the world; another of Hart’s atheistic heroes, David Hume, seems to have thought that it was perfectly possible to live a happy and decent life as a non-believer. Yet the new atheists seem steadfastly opposed even to entertaining the possibility that there might be any trade-offs involved in breaking from a theistic view of the world. Rather than explore the complex and daunting existential challenges involved in attempting to live a life without God, the new atheists rudely insist, usually without argument, that atheism is a glorious, unambiguous benefit to mankind both individually and collectively. There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of their books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists? Or have they made a strategic choice to downplay the difficulties of godlessness on the perhaps reasonable assumption that in a country hungry for spiritual uplift the only atheism likely to make inroads is one that promises to provide just as much fulfillment as religion? Either way, the studied insouciance of the new atheists can come to seem almost comically superficial and unserious. (Exhibit A: Blogger P.Z. Myers, who takes this kind of thing to truly buffoonish lengths, viciously ridiculing anyone who dares express the slightest ambivalence about her atheism.) 

So by all means, reject God. But please, let’s not pretend that the truth of godlessness necessarily implies its goodness. Because it doesn’t. 

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Blogging at World Affairs, David Rieff has written several recent posts in which he explores, and severely criticizes, the idea of American exceptionalism and its influence on the conduct of American foreign policy. Along the way he also has some flattering things to say about my own examination of the idea in several posts over the past nine months. But he also voices some concerns about my position. As he writes,

Linker is only willing to call for [the] modification [of exceptionalist thinking], not its abandonment. It is not, he wrote in another essay on the subject, “that patriots and politicians should abandon their faith that American power can play a positive role in the world. It is that they should act with caution in applying that power.” And he quotes approvingly [Reinhold] Niebuhr’s invocation of Lincoln, who managed to successfully “invoke the idea of American theological exceptionalism while avoiding the vices it so often encourages.” Linker goes on to praise President Obama for learning this Niebuhrian lesson as he “combines military action with efforts to rein in the country’s theologically inflated vision of itself.”



In Rieff’s view, my modified, Niebuhrian version of American exceptionalism is clearly a “more nuanced, more realistic, more humane, and more modest iteration of the exceptionalist creed and its corollary, the faith in America’s good intentions in the world,” than the one that echoes throughout so much of American history and that reached a kind of apotheosis with the “triumphalist version” affirmed by the Bush administration after 9/11. And yet, Rieff concludes, with considerable disappointment, that my vision of America and its role in the world is not a “radical departure” from that creed.

He’s right about that—though I also think that my writings on the topic have been less clear than they might have been on this point. Given the importance of American exceptionalist thinking to our country’s self-understanding and stance toward the rest of the world, its centrality to my criticism of Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru’s recent essay on the topic in National Review, and lingering questions about the extent to which liberals affirm, or should affirm, such thinking, I believe there's reason to revisit the topic in search of greater clarity. 

The first thing to note about American exceptionalist thinking is how crude it often is. The problem is not just, as Rieff rightly points out, that it presumes and encourages historical ignorance or amnesia. More fundamentally, those who espouse the rhetoric of exceptionalism often haven’t even figured out what they mean by the concept. Do they mean merely that America is distinctive in various ways, and worthy of admiration for certain of those distinctive qualities? This, in itself, isn’t a particularly controversial claim, since every nation is distinctive in particular ways, and some of those marks of distinction are admirable. But of course this isn’t all that champions of American exceptionalism mean when they deploy the term. In most cases, what they also mean is that America as a nation is uniquely virtuous, or better than, other nations. This is where things begin to become ridiculous.

The first thing to said about the latter view is that . . . we would think so, wouldn’t we? Going back to Aristotle, if not before, thinkers have noted the obvious truth that human beings are poor judges in their own cases. When reflecting on ourselves, self-love and other passions distort and bias our judgment, leading us to exaggerate our virtues and deny our faults. It is hardly surprising, then, that Americans tend to forget or downplay the importance of the morally dubious, and even at times morally outrageous, things our country has done over the years. We nearly exterminated the indigenous population of North America; we kept human beings as slaves for two-and-a-half centuries; we denied the descendants of those slaves full civil rights for another century after that; we made all sorts of mischief (and sometimes much worse) in Latin America and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and much more recently, we invaded and toppled the government of a sovereign nation on the basis of mistaken intelligence and then horribly mismanaged the occupation for years, precipitating a sectarian civil war that left many thousands dead and many more thousands displaced.

Those are the indisputable facts. To recognize and take them into account when judging our nation is not to single us out for opprobrium. That would be American exceptionalism in reverse—an example of the Chomskyite tendency to treat the country as singular in its moral monstrousness. The truth is that in many ways the United States is not exceptional at all. The world is a nasty, vicious place, and we’ve contributed our share of nastiness and viciousness over the years.

And yet America is also distinctive, and distinctively admirable, in many ways. In my view, the most distinctive and admirable of all our qualities is our liberalism. Now let me be clear: unlike Lowry and Ponnuru, who identify American exceptionalism with the laissez-faire capitalism favored by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, I do not mean to equate the ideology that dominates one of our country’s political parties with the nation’s exemplary essence. On the contrary, the liberalism I have singled out is embraced by nearly every member of both of our political parties—and indeed by nearly every American citizen. Liberalism in this sense is a form of government—one in which political rule is mediated by a series of institutions that seek to limit the powers of the state and maximize individual freedom: constitutional government, an independent judiciary, multiparty elections, universal suffrage, a free press, civilian control of the military and police, a large middle class, a developed consumer economy, and rights to free assembly and worship. To be a liberal in this primary sense is to favor a political order with these institutions and to abide by the political rules they establish.  

The United States is obviously very far from being the contemporary world’s only liberal nation. In what sense, then, is America exceptional? In the sense that we believe, in part for religious reasons, but also out of humanistic principle, that the benefits of political liberalism, which our nation achieved first in human history, can and should be enjoyed by every country, and by every person in every country, in the world. This conviction—an almost missionary compulsion to champion liberal-democratic self-government—is what most makes America exceptional. It is the core of our civil religion—and the goal that ought to guide our actions in the world.

Is this an endorsement of the thuggish imperialism Rieff detects in the American past and present and apparently fears in the American future? Not at all. Despite what one might conclude from the disastrous presidency of that liberal moralist George W. Bush, the imperative to support and encourage liberalism abroad does not necessitate stupidity. On the contrary, it demands intelligence and sobriety about how best to affect liberal change in divergent places at different historical moments. It demands that we temper our longing to fulfill our liberal duties with a clear-headed assessment of the possible unintended consequences of our actions. It demands that we remain forever mindful of the efficacy, as well as the limits, of our power (both hard and soft). It demands, in sum, that we combine grandly idealistic ends with cunningly realistic means, just as Niebuhr called on us to do, and as Lincoln showed us how to do. 

That we have often failed to achieve this synthesis is evidence of human (and American) imperfection as well as of the recalcitrance of a complicated, heartrending world. (Niebuhr thought it was also evidence of original sin, which is possible, though it's equally possible to make sense of tragedy in rigorously secular terms.) The proper response to these failures is redoubled resolution to do better, to be smarter, to choose more efficacious means, in the future. It is most certainly not to give up on the ends, as Rieff appears prepared to do.

Every now and then a piece of writing captures the mood of the moment and the essence of an ideology so completely that it warrants special attention. This is certainly the case with “An Exceptional Debate: The Obama Administration’s Assault on American Identity,” an essay (and cover story) by Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in the March 8 issue of National Review. Lowry and Ponnuru’s thesis—that President Obama is an enemy of “American exceptionalism”—is hardly original. It is so widely held and so frequently asserted on the right, in fact, that it can almost be described as conservative conventional wisdom. Still, NR’s treatment of the subject stands out. Lowry and Ponnuru aim for comprehensiveness, and they maintain a measured, thoughtful tone throughout their essay, marshalling a wide range of historical evidence for their thesis and making well-timed concessions to contrary arguments. It’s hard to imagine this key conservative claim receiving a more cogent and rhetorically effective defense. Which is precisely what makes the essay’s shortcomings so striking. While its authors clearly mean it to stand as a manifesto for a resurgent conservative moment, the essay far more resembles a lullaby—a comforting compilation of consoling pieties set to a soothingly familiar melody. The perfect soundtrack to a peaceful snooze.