Saturday, February 28, 2015

TAC: "Country Before Faith"

Read this wonderful piece on Walter Berns here. A taste:
... What I did know was that Berns was everything a teacher should be: engaging, opinionated but respectful of others, and a master of the material, which he obviously loved. Indeed, sometimes I think the best possible legacy of the Straussians a century hence will be that image of what a teacher should be.

His explication of the principles of the American Founding left a lasting impression on me, and his teaching provided a perfect counterpoint to my reading of Russell Kirk—in some ways, though not all, a thinker very different from Berns. I recall even now his lectures on why the Confederacy, rather than the Union, better embodied the dark side of progressive “science”—the South being explicitly founded on so-called racial science while the North stuck to Lockean natural rights and the British political tradition—and how Tocquevillian principles explained why there would always be more female models than male ones. As a sophomore I found him terrifying, and not much less so after three courses than when I took the first one.

Among the most vexing problems Berns addressed over his long career was that of religion in the American polity. An Episcopalian of the old school, Berns thought religion important but something that, in James Madison-like fashion, must be kept under control for fear of causing “faction.” In 1963, writing in National Review on “School Prayer and Religious Warfare,” Berns chided the Supreme Court for delving into religious controversy when it did not have to do so. The court had the year before invalidated a nonsectarian prayer in New York City public schools. Berns suggested that the court need not have decided the case, as sometimes it is more judicially appropriate not to act than it is to act, especially where questions that may cause social unrest are concerned. Here, he argued, the court could have taken refuge in the legal doctrine of “standing” to deny those bringing the case the ability to press their claim.

Berns thought that New York prayer decision was wrong as a matter not of jurisprudence but of simple prudence. The Constitution, he wrote, does not provide a definitive answer to whether such prayer should be permitted. Nor does history: here Berns referred to the Fourteenth Amendment, which imposed the strictures of the First Amendment on the states—which had in turn, from the time of the Revolution, a variety of different arrangements between church and government that provided more or less public support to religious belief. Those who would try to deny “incorporation” of the First Amendment’s rights as against the states “would need to ponder the desirability in this day of the alternative: states would still be free to disenfranchise men and women” because of their religious beliefs—a result, Berns implies, that should not be countenanced.
I would have loved to have had him as a teacher. I learned a great deal from him even as I disagree with him on various policy matters. And as much as I agree with certain of his insights on the American Founding, I think he was wrong on others.

12 comments:

Art Deco said...

.. What I did know was that Berns was everything a teacher should be: engaging, opinionated but respectful of others

I do not recall his correspondence with Richard John Neuhaus ca. 1996 had any of these attributes, or his ex parte remarks on Neuhaus.

Berns once provided a reply for a piece in The New Republic wherein participants were asked to suggest an amendment to the constitution. Some responses were gags (banning the designated hitter rule), some quite banal (Victor Navasky's suggestion that capital punishment be proscribed), but none spoke to any problems in political architecture. Berns' response - an amendment to prohibit further amendments - cured me of any ambition to read anything Berns ever wrote.

Somehow I suspect this man's career was testament to how soft was the academic job market ca. 1955.

Jonathan Rowe said...

The 1996 thing involved something very heated.

Jonathan Rowe said...

Berns was one of the most successful professors at Georgetown. He didn't get there in 1955, but rather after he resigned from Cornell with Allan Bloom.

Jonathan Rowe said...

Berns had a bad experience with left revolutionaries at Cornell; he saw First Things flirting with right revolutionarism. We had one in 1776 and didn't need another. Ironic in that Alan Keyes seems way more of a wacky revolutionary than First Things were during the 96 incident. Keyes played a key role as victim during the Cornell incident that triggered Berns' & Blooms' resignations.

Art Deco said...

The 1996 thing involved something very heated.

No Berns was heated. The articles themselves were perfectly temperate.

Neuhaus had a considerable history of publishing exchanges in his magazine and Berns could have composed one, enumerating his objections. Instead, he wrote a letter to Neuhaus telling him he did not wish to argue with him on the subject, and told him to remove his name from the masthead. He insulted Neuhaus in other venues.

And we know why. At the time of his bust up with the Institute on Religion and Public Life, Walter Berns had published next to no original research in peer-reviewed fora in nearly 15 years. What he had published was a scatter of book reviews, replies, commentaries, and transcripts of panel discussions. In the succeeding 15 years, there might have been a couple of pieces. As for his late monographs, there was only one issued by a university press and you can check on Amazon the bibliography and notes of his 2002 and 2010 issues. It won't take long, because neither one has any such apparatus.

The legal-formal wing of political science does not make for the most demanding research program to begin with and it's a reasonable wager he was by 1997 what most of us are when we're pushing 80 - spent. However, there does come a time in a man's life when a man gets to say whatever he damn well pleases, a privilege of which Dr. Berns availed himself.

Art Deco said...

Berns was one of the most successful professors at Georgetown. He didn't get there in 1955, but rather after he resigned from Cornell with Allan Bloom.

Berns was an established academic in 1969 and with sufficient publications to move elsewhere in that environment. Per George Will, the academic job market was comparatively undemanding when he entered it in 1967. A professor of my acquaintance put it this way, "I assume I got a letter when I got tenure. I don't remember. It wasn't a big issue." (He was hired in 1962 and tenured in 1967). The reserve army of unemployed scholars appeared ca. 1974.

Jonathan Rowe said...

As I recall there were a bunch of other distinguished folks on Berns' side during that event over, what was it Romer v. Evans that triggered it?

It was framed as a "neo-con"-"theo-con" split. Since I'm neither I really just enjoyed watching from the sidelines.

On a related note, do you know I wrote one piece for First Things. Probably one of the most insignificant things ever to appear in their journal. But that sorta made an impact that I ended up milking.

Art Deco said...

As I recall there were a bunch of other distinguished folks on Berns' side during that event over, what was it Romer v. Evans that triggered it?

No, Peter Berger and one other person resigned from the board of the Institute. None of them offered much of an explanation which made any sense. Academics are an other-directed bunch.

Jonathan Rowe said...

Gertrude Himmelfarb?

Jonathan Rowe said...

BTW: I think the original articles in the symposium do speak in hyperbole.

But I can speak in that language myself.

From Bork's contribution:

"Under what appears to be the majority’s rationale, it is difficult to see how any federal or state statute could be constitutional."

Good riddance. The vast majority of corrupt tyrannical bullshit from the modern state comes from the legislative and executive branches (and especially from administrative agencies whatever "branch" they count under).

This is regardless of whether the courts are behaving properly.

Art Deco said...

You're not making much sense at this point.

Jonathan Rowe said...

That might have been the Tequila talking.

As a libertarian I have a problem with the way the modern state operates. All 3 branches are guilty, fine.

The chief problem is not the judiciary.

The judiciary needs to be more active in nullifying the actions of the other branches of government.