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PDF FormatIt is impossible to legitimize a conservative predisposition in politics, as well as a conservative predisposition in religion, without having an authentic respect for tradition. And this respect for tradition must be intellectually defensible. For such a defense one turns to Burke who, when confronted by the radical opposition to tradition which was the essence of the French Revolution, became the first political theorist of the modern world to articulate a powerful defense of tradition.
But once deference to tradition has been rationally justified, it has to be put into practice in society, and in government. And to do this, the innovative market economy which characterizes contemporary democracy, and the conservative tradition, have to be adjusted to one another—a fact which was well understood by the father of capitalist thought, Adam Smith. For unlike some of today’s free-market enthusiasts, Adam Smith was no radical economic individualist. He thought a state would be foolish to try to usurp the prerogatives of the market, but he did not give these prerogatives a universal scope. He saw an important role for the state in education, in taxation including redistributive taxation, and in certain forms of poor relief. It is impossible to say what his attitudes would be regarding the affluent societies of our century, but he did, after all, write a book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which placed a strong emphasis on compassion as the natural bond between human beings, including human beings in a capitalistic market economy. So it is likely that, were he alive, he would not wish to uproot the welfare state root and branch. And as for Burke, while he emphasized the importance of the family and of the institutions of what we now call civil society, he also praised the properly ordered state—whose propriety was visible in the respect it showed for the institution of property—as a partner in the perfection of all things human. Nothing less than that.
The possibility of reconciling conservative traditions of religion or morality with the freedom of a market economy is not only a matter of speculation. It has formidable historical antecedents, which, even if they are unfamiliar to many today, are nevertheless at the heart of the Anglo-American tradition of free government. In the United States, between the founding of the republic and World War II, approximately 175 years of conflict between the secular market economy and a religious predisposition excited scarcely a tremor in the body politic. One can find proof of this by consulting any major textbook in American history published before 1945. A glance at the index may reveal a few passing references to “church and state” relations, but nothing more. You look up “censorship” and you find no reference at all, although there was a great deal of censorship taking place. Over the last fifty years, the national issue which we now refer to as “religion in the public square” has engendered an entire library of legal arguments, but prior to 1945, it is clear that the issue could not have been that controversial, for the simple reason that there were hardly any legal rulings on the subject: There were virtually no Supreme Court decisions that addressed this issue.
The reason for this is an instructively practical one: Under the American federal system, issues such as school prayer, religious activities on public grounds, censorship of pornography—in short, the great majority of religious and moral issues—were adjudicated by political negotiations at the local level. These negotiations took into account the magnitude and intensity of public opinion on either side of an issue, and after some useful if sometimes painful experience, each community reached a via media that it could live with. In general, minority opinion was always respected, but majority opinion always received the greater deference. To reach such accepted norms in such a way that people could live together did not require a great deal of theorizing about absolute systems of universal rights; but what it did require was a great deal of inherited wisdom and common sense, on the part of the majority and on the part of the minority.
A few examples will suffice to make it clear what this meant in practice. When I went to elementary school in Brooklyn, we had an assembly once a week, which the principal of the school always began with a prayer. Now, the school was about one-half Jewish, with the rest of the students being Irish, Italian or Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The principal was no fool, so he read a Psalm. The nice thing about the Psalms is that they are of Jewish origin, are part of the Christian Bible, but Jesus is not mentioned. So what Jew was going to object? Mind you, Jews these days do object to the reading of Psalms in public schools. But in those days, there were no Jews who would object to reading a Psalm, and no Christians who would object either. It was a common-sense solution to a problem; it worked for many, many decades.
Similarly, when I was young, there were burlesque shows, “topless” shows, we would call them, in New York, and Fiorello La Guardia, a very liberal and progressive mayor, decided that this was not good for the city. He did not want New York City to be known as a center for strip-tease shows, so he prohibited them. Just like that. The issue was taken to court, and the court ruled that La Guardia was the elected representative of the public, and if the public wanted things that way, it was their right. People who didn’t like it could leave New York City and move to Newark, where you could go to a burlesque show. There was no outraged public debate, no crisis, no book written on the subject. In the United States in that era, any community that wanted to order its public life in a certain way was permitted to do so. One’s position had to be “within reason,” but the point is that the range of issues which one could reasonably decide one way or another was considered to be quite broad, and open to a process of political trial and error. If Boston wanted to ban a book that had sex scenes in it, it did so. And then the book sellers in New York put up big signs in their store windows that said “Banned in Boston,” and this would be great for business. This might have been difficult to fit into some great universal system, but it took into account the traditions and feelings of these very different cities, and as a consequence, public life in both Boston and New York was conducted in a way that allowed most people in both cities to be happy.
In general, the political handling of controversial religious and moral issues in the United States prior to World War II was a triumph of reasoned experience over abstract dogmatism. Unfortunately, since around 1950, it is abstract dogmatism that has triumphed over reasoned experience in American public life. As everyone knows, this unwarranted and unfortunate reversal has provoked a constitutional crisis where there had never been one before. And much as I regret to say this, the sad fact is that American Jews have played a very important role—in some ways a crucial role—in creating this crisis.
It is a fairly extraordinary story when one stops to think about it. In the decades after World War II, as anti-Semitism declined precipitously, and as Jews moved massively into the mainstream of American life, the official Jewish organizations took advantage of these new circumstances to prosecute an aggressive campaign against any public recognition, however slight, of the fact that most Americans are Christian. It is not that the leaders of the Jewish organizations were anti-religious. Most of the Jewish advocates of a secularized “public square” were themselves members of Jewish congregations. They believed, in all sincerity, that religion should be the private affair of the individual. Religion belonged in the home, in the church and synagogue, and nowhere else. And they believed in this despite the fact that no society in history has ever acceded to the complete privatization of a religion embraced by the overwhelming majority of its members. The truth, of course, is that there is no way that religion can be obliterated from public life when 95 percent of the population is Christian. There is no way of preventing the Christian holidays, for instance, from spilling over into public life. But again, before World War II, there were practically no Jews who cared about such things. I went to a public school, where the children sang carols at Christmastime. Even among those Jews who sang them, I never knew a single one who was drawn to the practice of Christianity by them. Sometimes, the schools sponsored Nativity plays, and the response of the Jews was simply not to participate in them. There was no public “issue” until the American Civil Liberties Union—which is financed primarily by Jews—arrived on the scene with the discovery that Christmas carols and pageants were a violation of the Constitution. As a matter of fact, our Jewish population in the United States believed in this so passionately that when the Supreme Court, having been prodded by the aclu, ruled it unconstitutional for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in a public school, the Jewish organizations found this ruling unobjectionable. People who wanted their children to know about the Ten Commandments could send their children to heder.
