You can always count on Turnabout for the finest in reactionary sophistry. In Mr. Kalb's world, academic liberals are children playing in the simplistic theoretical toybox of the Enlightenment, while the grown-ups (who understand the world in the more "complex" terms furnished by feudal mysticism and ancient prejudice--prejudice is a good thing for Kalb, as it was for Edmund Burke) get stuck with the disagreeable task of cleaning up after the "godless".

But, you know, I live in America now, and, when I hear the voices of the people who are planning to vote for Bush on the radio, I don't detect any hint of the "complex" worldview that Jim Kalb attributes to them. Instead, I hear things like: "I think the President knows what's best. I'm afraid, and he makes me feel better. He's a man. He reminds me of my daddy."

So where's the complexity? All I see there is the deferral of moral authority. Jim hates the idea that "man is the measure of all things", but what does he substitute for it. Well, God, of course. But the problem, as always, is--whose God? And, what, tha fuck, is meant by the term "the godly".

I don't believe in an anthropomorphized God, capable of writing on tablets and telling Jim Kalb that women should rest their dizzy heads on patriarchal hulks like himself and that gay people are sick--but I'll tell you this: I do consider myself a moral person--and maybe even a "godly" one. Furthermore, I actually wouldn't hesitate to label a political Catholic like Jim Kalb a blasphemer. If "God" is a completely alien thing (and I firmly agree--in good Calvinist fashion--consistent Calvinism is, after all, indistinguishable from "atheism"), where does Jim Kalb get off claiming to know anything about his/her/its relationship to people and the affairs of state?

But I'll submit it to you: whose "God" is more "complex"? Mine--a force (call it love/respect for the Other) which both undergirds and makes intersubjectivity possible; or Jim's--a big guy in the sky that looks and talks exactly like Jim... I readily accept Kalb's description of liberalism as an "horizontal" philosophy--I would simply contend that a universe full of infinitely discrete essences and clashing subjectivities is a lot more complex than Jim's (wildly mystical/theoretical) "great chain of being".