What We Should Learn

Peggy Noonan like most of America's first rate journalists today, is conservative and a woman. What we've learned from 9/11 is America is great and Americans are fine. Also that most of us know what is right and what is wrong. What we've learned of our "division" is that, really, "we are one people," this reflecting what we've also learned that "in the life of this nation faith trumps everything." The Wall Street Journal's editors' own "Aside" brings Noonan's sentiments into focus by noting that even the relentlessly anti-religious ACLU doesn't "seem to want to spoil this picture." This Sanhedrin of Marxist political correctness hasn't "threatened legal action against the NYC Board of Education" regarding some Muslim students "going peacefully about their Ramadan observances."

Is this what we've learned? Maybe so. But then we haven't learned what will trump America. The Journal, great as it is, is teaching us its resistance to the rest of the elite press is not more than sentimentality.

But if we are one people and faith trumps all, the practical meaning of this is that multiculturalism, meaning any "faith," thus all faith trumps all. Faith in everything. America, stretching the point at being a Judeo-Christian people, is to be now a Muslim country, too? If religion simply, all religion or radical tolerance is what America's faith is, we must also suppose two things that are false.

1. While it is right to be "tolerant" it is wrong to embrace multiculturalism. If there is to be a country called the US and not the United Nations, the New York Times' faith in a "quintessentially American notion" so that everyone should "be a minority" cannot also be true. The practical meaning of such a notion of a county which is the UN is universal tyranny. It is not an accident that the UN is an anti-American institution; and an anti-Christian one (and an anti-Jewish one in spite of the New York Times and the ACLU).

2. And so the second thing we must suppose is false is that radical tolerance and multiculturalism is not the extreme of intolerance. We must suppose that e pluribus unum and the melting pot were devised to leech out what protects men and permits them to act in history and time as nations. When a person belongs to a nation it is his chance to participate in the highest opportunity anyone ever gets to be a part of the universal human effort to produce great human things -- and every such group is unique. And every nation (anciently called kingdoms and later cities) is a nation of immigrants. Exactly the great evil of our present enemy is that it wishes to divide the world between infidels and believers and to murder the infidels. What is wrong in this, but also why it works so well with the New York Times and our own political classes the Journal so often well scolds and flails, is the aim. The aim is what "tolerance" looks like when it breaks its human bounds, becoming a principle and mode of existence (the universal and homogeneous state) and not what it is, a subordinate decency among higher human aims. The real alternative to national existence is tyranny. But it is also an impossible tyranny. A universal people is the meaning of sub-human. There is no such human thing as a single state. But it is the aim, whether thoughtlessly because its pursuers are fools, or consciously because its pursuers are evil, that we are fighting now. It is clear we are fighting it in ourselves having learned it from the guardians of our culture; people such as Yale's professor Kennedy of whom the Journal knew well enough to paint as a fool or as evil.

The lesson we should be learning from 9/11 -- and the Journal and Noonan have the sentiments right and also the policies that are required in the "extreme cases" -- is that national existence is always unique and our highest form. Until we learn this lesson, and take action including intolerant action toward foreigners for the sake of the lives of members of the national body, we stand to lose and help others lose the one thing that insures our humanity.

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