The Reticulator

I didn’t know Mexico ever had a president like Porfirio Díaz. I learned about him while reading “Bound in Twine : The history and ecology of the Henequen-Wheat complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950” by Sterling Evans (2007). On page 42 he links Diaz with 19th century positivism, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and private property. I presume there is more to learn about him from this book, but I get a rather different picture of him from Wikipedia. In any case, this is something I need to learn more about, especially as it relates to the communal land holdings of the native peoples.

Well, I barely know what to say other than to expose my ignorance of this bit of history, which I’m doing here as seems to be the proper thing to do in this age of blogs.

And that got me to thinking that blogs are a modern version of the “blab schools” like those that Abraham Lincoln attended. In those schools all students would recite their lessons out loud simultaneously, which made for a cacophonous educational experience. Now modern technology has increased the ability for all of us to blab at once about what we’re learning, even if it’s not very well digested knowledge.

Not that I’m complaining. My own elementary education was in one- and two-room schools. First and second grades were spent in a one-room school, complete with pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room, overlooking the Missouri River in central North Dakota. I have always appreciated that I was able to listen to the 7th and 8th grade boys at their lessons. It was certainly more interesting than our Dick and Jane. And here were these big kids who we thought would just as soon kill us little kids if they were even to recognize our existence, and they were discussing poetry and literature. It was the usual fare in American public schools of the time — things like Longfellow’s “Evangeline” and Edward Everett Hale’s “Man Without a Country.” But those big, tough kids were so earnest in their discussions. I don’t remember what they said, but I still remember the tone of their discussions, which didn’t at all match what I saw out on the playground. It was disconcerting, but also made me want to get to the point where I could learn the things they were learning.

Maybe I’m feeling a little bit of that now.

Below is from Joseph Bottum’s eulogy of Richard John Neuhaus in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard.

I often refer to the fact that there used to be liberals but there is hardly a one still left. I usually point to Nat Hentoff as being one of the few remaining ones, but I should have included Richard John Neuhaus in that group, too. I wonder if the two ever met — the anti-abortion liberal who is an athiest, and the anti-abortion, conservative liberal who was a pastor and priest. I would have loved to sit and listen while those two talked.

Take abortion, for instance. In 1968, he won the award for best editorial of the year from the Catholic Press Association–Catholics liked giving awards to a Lutheran in those days; they thought of it as being bravely trendy and ecumenical–for an essay in which he cried, “The pro-abortion flag is being planted on the wrong side of the liberal/conservative divide.” It ought to be those heartless conservatives who want to define the fetus as a meaningless lump of tissue; it ought to be caring liberals who want to expand the community of care to embrace the unborn.

If he later came to have a kinder view of conservatives, that was because he finally met some of them. But the pattern established by abortion continued through to his death. His work in founding the communitarian movement in 1977 came not because he thought he had changed but because he thought the United States was abandoning its commitment to families and all the voluntary associations that Tocqueville observed as a defining part of a liberal republic. He wrote his most famous book, The Naked Public Square–his 1984 argument against the attempt to secularize every part of shared life–because he thought the nation was in danger of losing the religious dynamism that had fueled everything from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches to Martin Luther King’s protests.

Even his conversion to Catholicism in 1990, and his ordination as a Catholic priest the next year, could be understood as a standing-still while the world altered around him. This was a man, after all, who titled his account of conversion “How I Became the Catholic That I Was.”

I learned today that Richard John Neuhaus died Thursday. Here, for my convenience, are links to WSJ articles about him in Friday’s paper:

• Rev. Neuhaus, an Influential Catholic Conservative, Dies (AP article)
• Restless Intellectual Yoked Catholics and Evangelicals by Stephen Miller
• Father Richard John Neuhaus: A Man Animated by His Faith by Raymond Arroyo
• The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s by Richard John Neuhaus

Before I go to read these articles, I’ll mention that I had not paid a lot of attention to him until he turned conservative (sort of) though I had known of him before that. I started paying more attention to him after I had pretty well recovered from my own bout of left-liberalism during the McGovern-Nixon days.

He was a pastor in the same church organization where I got my undergraduate education. Some of the more liberal pastors who had known him in seminary days and during the civil rights conflicts, and who had thought of him as a kindred spirit, were puzzled and dismayed when they found him serving as religion editor at National Review. Then he was no longer at National Review, but had become a Roman Catholic priest, which puzzled some of the more conservative pastors.

When I asked one pastor just what his pastoral duties were that they would allow him to keep the kind of schedule he did, I was told that in the negotations by which he entered the Catholic Church that he was given carte blanche to do almost anything he wanted.

Yes, I know. You don’t enter the church through negotiations. So that’s probably a crass way of putting it. And I don’t know if this was true or not, or how the teller knew about this, but he was in more of a position to know than I was.

I occasionally looked at Neuhaus’s First Things magazine, and even wanted to blog about one article that appeared there recently. Never got around to it, and never got around to learning a lot of things about Father Neuhaus, though I have a feeling it would have been better if I had. Maybe it’s not too late.