Of lager beer and an Ohio German Catholic Bigot

By Christopher Zehnder

“Almost fit for the abode of personal gods”: St. Michael’s Church, Fort Loramie, Ohio

In studying history, it is important to pay attention not only to major themes and players but to the places, communities, and individuals most people never hear about. This is why I like to read local histories – they offer details that fill out general historical accounts and provide a more articulated understanding of historical periods. Local histories give us a more nuanced taste; they develop the palate of historical imagination. They fill out the important human details that get lost in the reading of general history.

Recently, while wandering through an antique store in Powell, Ohio, I came across just such a local history, Historical Collections of Ohio, by one Henry Howe, LL.D. Published in 1908, Historical Collections describes what Mr. Howe learned of Ohio’s communities during two periods of travel through the state: the first in 1846 and the second in 1886-90. Thus far, I have discovered several interesting details about my new home state. One in particular I found arresting. In discussing Shelby County, in western Ohio between Lima (the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, Ernest Anderegg, incidentally) and Dayton to the south, Howe quotes a description in “Sutton’s County History” of a German Catholic settlement, the “village of Berlin,” in what is now the Fort Loramie, Ohio.

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An antidote to despair: Tradition, reason, and the Church

By Christopher Zehnder

Here I continue with the theme of last week’s essay, “Traditionalists are Right, Sort of…”

Henry David Thoreau, an anti-traditionalist

One of the most compelling arguments against a reverence for tradition is that traditions are often wrong. Henry David Thoreau stated the matter in words that still resonate. He wrote in Walden, “What everybody echoes or in silence passes as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.”

Throughout history, men have discovered that what their ancestors passed down to them as true was merely false. One could point to many examples of false traditions – polygamy, for instance, or chattel slavery. Throughout most of human history, both of these institutions, especially slavery, were considered simply part of the order of things. One did not question them, because they were woven into the traditional – handed down – fabric of life.

The fact, too, of the diverse human traditions, holding to contrary propositions as true or enjoining clashing customs and modes of behavior, underlines the fact that tradition and truth are not necessarily synonymous. Even so great a mind as Aristotle saw the exposing to death of weak or disabled infants as part of the order of things, while our Christian tradition sees this as murder. American native peoples thought it perfectly acceptable to torture and mutilate their enemies, while Europeans thought the practice barbaric – even if, at times, they indulged in it. Hindus hold cows as sacred, while we treat them as provender.

Traditionalists are right, sort of … Beyond reaction to radicalism

By Christopher Zehnder

Since the French Revolution, we in Western culture have tended to look on all political and social thought as lying along a continuum. We stretch the world of men on a rack that is marked “left,” “right,” and “center.” The “left” we call “liberal,” fond of change and oriented to that non-existence we call the “future.” The “right” is “conservative,” skeptical (leftists say “fearful”) of change, zealous to maintain the status quo, and preservative of the past. At least, so go the common stereotypes of both groups – which, like a lot of stereotypes, have in them a good deal of truth mixed with a fair amount of caricature.

Along this continuum, the traditionalist is thought to fall to the right of center, even to the right of right, if this were possible. If the garden-variety rightist does not like change, the traditionalist (it is thought) positively hates it. If the typical rightist wants to preserve the past, the traditionalist wants to resurrect it. To this way of thinking, the traditionalist is basically an antiquarian, but not the congenial sort that collects Ming vases or favors period instruments in the performance of Bach. No, this sort of traditionalist is political and so a dangerous fellow, a social Luddite who would take a brickbat to the machinery of progress. He is the enemy of life, a devotee of a static reality no longer existent, for it is past. Even his fellow rightists – the “conservatives” – don’t often like the traditionalist.

Back to Nature: the Antidote to the Post-Modern Mind

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Post-Modernism

By Christopher Zehnder

St. Jerome in his study, by Albrecht Dürer

In a recent article published in the journal Commonweal (“The Dead End of the Left? Augusto Del Noce’s Critique of Modern Politics”), author Carlo Lancelotti makes this observation. “The experience,” he says, “of politically engaged Catholics, both in Europe and in the United States, during the past fifty years” has been “a long series of rear-guard battles on ethical issues (divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, etc.) in a cultural context in which the philosophical and religious images (of human life, of marriage, love) that underpinned those ethical values has faded. As a consequence, little can be gained by producing more comprehensive ethical lists, such as ‘consistent ethics of life.’” The reason for the insufficiency of such lists simply is, says Lancelotti, that “[e]thical appeals not backed by ‘Being’ are destined either to fall on deaf ears, as expressions of personal religious preferences, or to develop into moralistic ideologies (think of ‘political correctness’) backed by the will to power.”

Lancelotti aptly summarizes the condition of social and political conflict today. We are experiencing the flowering of the “post-modern mind,” a phenomenon that those of us who came of age in the last two decades of the 20^th century can only view with incomprehension. For whatever the confusions of our youth, we at least suffered the illusion that we and our ideological opponents spoke a common moral language. Terms such as “human rights,” “justice,” and “freedom” were rooted (so we thought) in a worldview founded on a kind of moral consensus that, if vague, was nevertheless consistent across ideological divides. For us, the thing we called “western civilization” provided a common ground for discussion and debate. We needed only to find the right arguments to awaken our opponents to the better angels of our commonly held suppositions. Indeed, the only hindrance to success in this endeavor was the perversity arising from our opponents’ bad will, their unwillingness to draw logical conclusions from commonly held premises. Or so we thought.