We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Here’s a nice quote from James Lileks in a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, via RadioBlogger. Earlier in the interview, Lileks mentioned hearing a news report that referred to US troops as ‘our troops’, and it jarred him. Not because he disagreed with it, of course, but because it was such an unusual phrasing. Lileks being the guardian of defenseless emphemera that he is, he contrasted today’s war reporting with what the country got during WWII. Then he took the conjugational point a step further:

I don’t believe, necessarily, that the even-handed approach is what’s required here. It’s good when you’re covering a school board meeting. It’s fine when you’re covering a fire, and it’s necessary to look at things from combustion’s point of view as well. But in this case, we…actually, there is an us. There is, at the end of the day, an us, which is a civilization, which I think…well, again, it comes back to what you’ve pointed out, what Hitchens has pointed out, what Steyn’s pointed out, and that is that this is essentially an existential matter. And that feeling, I don’t believe, is shared. I’m not even exactly sure that the other side knows what the word means, necessarily.

I see this as a profound problem that the West has tried to ignore for over a century, especially after WWI. Our nations include among their citizens people who hope the nation will fall, and our culture includes among its members many people who hope that it will die.

This problem is nothing new. Every successful nation has had to deal it. But it never got serious for the non-western nations, because they had a much bigger problem: political instability. When the country experienced a bloody revolution every generation or so, a natural consequence was the mass execution of many if not all of the people who supported the losing side. Those periodic civil wars were terribly destructive, of course, and it was one of Western Civilization’s great advances to discover a system under which control of the government could change hands without mass bloodshed. We don’t fight civil wars very often in the West. Instead, we hold elections in which we open and examine the ever-shifting beliefs and group loyalties among the citizens. Non-democratic governments try to suppress those changes and force them underground until they explode in a cataclysm. Democratic government avoids that cataclysm by systematically releasing that pressure and steadily conforming government to the desires of its citizens.

For those who would be king, it’s a compromise. If your faction is out of power, then the system hopes that you will view gaining an electoral majority as an easier task than winning a civil war. If your faction is in power, then the system hopes that you will accept the limits on your power (i.e., a future election) in exchange for the assurance that you won’t be executed if your faction falls from power.

But some people don’t accept those terms. They aren’t willing to accept those limits on the power they crave, and they challenge the system itself. They want to tear down democracy. We don’t have a system for dealing with those people.

C.S. Lewis saw this coming fifty years ago. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a child, but I didn’t understand it until I watched the movie last December. The commentary about the movie had so much chatter about Christianity that I nearly missed the real point. The story is only a Christian allegory in the vaugest sense. It’s really about British patriotism and revival. The lion is the ancient symbol of Britain, see. The moviemakers understood this, and filled the screen with British symbols.

If you start there, then the plot takes on a significance that I had never understood before. TLTW&TW first came out in 1950, which means what Lewis would have written it in the late forties, right after Britain took a hard left after WWII and threw out Churchill. My theory is that Lewis was wondering how Britain could redeem itself from that era’s destructive policies. He had faith, I think, that Britain could redeem itself, but the question was how. With so many people committed to Britain’s destruction—and there were many hardcore socialists and communists in Britain at the time—what would Britain do with them all when its redemption came?

Recall the story’s plot: Four siblings, Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy, venture through a magical portal into Narnia, which suffers under the Ice Queen’s tyranny and a consequent century of winter. But the queen’s grip on power is slipping, because the great lion Aslan is gathering an army to oppose her. The children’s arrival coincides with prophecy: They are to lead Aslan’s army against the queen.

It’s pretty standard fantasy stuff up to that point, but then it takes a distinctive turn: The queen tempts Edmund into helping her against his siblings. That betrayal powers the plotline. Aslan’s forces eventually free Edmund, and his siblings forgive him. But simple forgiveness isn’t enough. The queen claims Edmund as her own, under ancient magic. Aslan offers himself in Edmund’s stead. The queen kills Aslan and goes to war against his demoralized army. But Aslan rises from the dead and helps vanquish the queen.

Try to ignore the rising-from-the-dead part, and focus instead on the Ice Queen’s demand: It isn’t enough for Edmund’s siblings to forgive him. Betrayal from within the family runs too deep for that. When your own brother tries to kill you, you don’t just brush it off. Resolution requires something more profound, which in Lewis’s story was the sacrifice of the strong, noble, and completely innocent Aslan. What he had in mind for Britain I can’t imagine.

I’m asking the same question: Many if not most of us in America want this kind of rebirth as a nation. We want a sense of national purpose and identity, and we’re moving steadily in that direction. But a strident and powerful minority doesn’t want that. They don’t like our country. They say that it’s evil. They cheer for our enemies and gloat over our fallen soldiers. They pretend that this isn’t treason by claiming to support the ‘real’ America, which exists only in their imaginations and looks nothing like the current one. But that ruse is wearing thin.

As conservatives, we can absorb ourselves in the day-to-day tactics involved in reclaiming our identity and sense of purpose. But I wonder about the longer question, the same one Lewis wrote about: What do we do with all these America-haters? Let’s suppose that everything goes just as conservatives wish: limited government, low taxes, secure borders, assimilation of immigrants, military triumphs abroad, peace in the world, economic prosperity, etc. After all that, we still have millions of Americans who wanted the country to fall. What do we say to them? What do we do with them?

I have no answers today; just hard questions. We can’t just kill them all, as the communists do. We have no magical lion to sacrifice. I guess that we figure it out when we get there.