Retired, but not from everything

So, as of the end of last year I am retired.  Though I don't intend to continue to practice, I thought it best to renew my law license for at least another year.

So here's the old blog, which I haven't even touched since 2023, and it's not like there's any lack of talk in the cacophony of the web.  Still....

This morning at breakfast I picked out at random a volume of Petrarch's letters and opened it to a letter to Bocaccio.  Apparently a monk of some reputation had recently died, and just before his death he made a series of prophecies and directions to various individuals.  To Bocaccio he predicted that Bocaccio would die soon and that he should give up poetry ("tibi pretorea poetice studium interdici")

To this direction Petrarch tactfully replied that though perhaps it is good for an old man not to take up letters as a new endeavor,  a long-time and practiced writer like Bocaccio, far from being vexed by a strenuous challenge in his old age, would find refreshment and delight in it, and he then went on about old men whose late writing had added to the store of human wisdom.

I am of course no Bocaccio, no Petrarch, but perhaps it's a little early to go silent, to do what More expressed a hopeless desire for, "that my whole study should be upon...mine own passage out of this world."

This world is in fact unexpectedly different from what it was only seventeen years ago when I began this blog--as am I.  But I still retain the conviction, as expressed in the opening posts, that the ideals of Christian Humanism exemplified in the work of Thomas More and Erasmus are of paramount value.

This blog in the past has not typically addressed political and social questions.  But in recent years there have arisen direct challenges to those Enlightenment values undergirding our American republic's founding and progress--tolerance, equal protection of the laws, freedom of speech, religion and  press, governance with the consent of the people and curbing the power of excessive wealth and privilege.  If these ideals were not directly advocated by More and Erasmus, they certainly can trace their lineage back to Erasmus' call for tolerance of theological differences and More's assertion in Utopia that private ownership of property is the root of unrest and injustice.

And in fact, the mainstreaming of once-fringe attacks on these values has led me, in the past year, to revisit the development of what might be called, for want of a better term, our "liberal tradition":  Hobbes and Locke in England, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau in France, Paine, Jefferson and Lincoln in America.  If nothing else, such study reminds us that intolerance, oppression, censorship and crushing inequality have been history's default.

Fascism is not the only ideology that repudiates the liberal tradition, but it is the only one which is unquestionably on the rise today--as it was a century ago in Europe and America.  Robert Paxton, arguably one of the great historians of 20th century fascism, defined it, in his 2004 Anatomy of Fascism, as"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence, and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."  That sounds unhappily familiar.

I know that this alarm has been raised many times before.  What makes the present different?

First, in its worst decision since Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court has inexplicably held that the chief magistrate of our republic, whose whole job is to faithfully see that the laws are executed, may himself violate any and every criminal law if arguably in the course of carrying out his official duty.  Why then should we be surprised that almost his first official act has been to nullify the constitutional definition of citizenship, just a few short hours after taking a solemn oath to "preserve, protect and defend the constitution"?  That he has ordered a round-up of the poorest, most helpless of those among us, calling them criminals?  That he has not hesitated to enrich himself with his position?  Or that he has rescinded President Johnson's directive--dating from when I was thirteen years old!--that the federal government should not discriminate against the historically disadvantaged and oppressed?

The balance of power is seriously out of joint.  And if we continue much further down this road with a cowardly congressional majority and a compliant judiciary it's hard to see how our constitutional order can ever recover.

Nevertheless...I would conclude with some words from "A Man for All Seasons."  These are not Thomas More's words, but the words of the playwright, Robert Bolt, so far as I know.  But they are good words, and they suggest a way forward.

More is in prison, and his daughter Meg argues that in refusing to recognize King Henry as head of the church he thereby elects to make himself a hero.

"More" replies:

"That's very neat.  But look now....If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly.  And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes.  But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all...why then perhaps we must stand fast a little--even at the risk of being heroes."