As you know from my earliest essays, I’ve been doing this kind of work for several years. At VassarBushmills.com I’ve compiled a brief history of my work in the Soviet Bloc, starting in Ukraine, mainly in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest industrial city. The USSR formally broke apart in Dec,1991, and I had been given a heads-up about a week before I arrived. The Ukrainians were almost giddy at their new-found freedom, not fully understanding that all that had happened was the management of the government and its hundreds of production facilities had merely been turned over to new management, as often as not, to the same management teams,just under a new name.
You may have seen in the almost daily news reports news stories about the back and forth warfare going between Russia and Ukraine. I was a paid consultant to help business-entrepreneurs from the Cincinnati-area find clients, just as the USSR was being disassembled , who could sell their products in the Ohio Valley around Cincinnati. My job was to meet the producer, using a small consulting team in Kharkiv working out of a bank. Then I would visit the operation’s plant.
I did this for about five (5) months, plus deal with (sometimes lines) of representatives who’d show up at the bank’s doors, just to be able to sit down and explain their farms’ or collectives’ product line. These were real farmers; knee boots, wool coats and those funny hats, and very affable, compared to the factory bosses. (Some had driven over 100 miles over treacherous 2-laned roads in icy wintry-condition, all the way from the Crimean Peninsula, just to give me same meat samplings, on a kind of Russian bread.) It was at these sessions that I got to learn about the primary differences between Russians (who are of Slavic origin) and Ukrainians, who were of Tatar and Jewish origins, dating back centuries. Although they lived and worked together, with shared histories going back to the Middle Ages, there were biases going in both directions, inasmuch as Ukrainians considered the Russians to be beneath them racially, while Russians considered them “subjects” because the Russian tsars had ruled over them for a thousand years.
This bubbled over in WWII when the Germans under Hitler invaded and occupied Ukraine, from 1942-1944. The battlefield at Kursk, 1943, was the largest battle in military history, mostly between Soviet and German tanks, and the Russians won that battle. And I’d walked all over it. As the defeated Germans retreated back to Germany thousands of Ukrainians followed them to serve the German war cause. So, at war’s end, and the winners gathered at Yalta, Stalin demanded those Ukrainians be repatriated back to Ukraine (USSR). Churchill wanted to send them, (since he wanted to repay England’s debt to the Russians), but FDR wanted to allow them to be rescued from the Germans who hung them as traitors. A tough call.
I wanted to introduce my experiences in Ukraine, plus 15+ years in the Balkans. I stopped going around 2000, my best friend there passing away.
The Transcendence of Liberty
I’ve told this story before, of the time in 1991 I attended a birthday party for a law professor at a university in USSR Ukraine. Around three tables pushed together, in a dimly lit room, in early-winter, there were twelve, mostly academicians, all standing, glasses held high, while the host’s son would go around and fill each glass with a home-brew vodka in a very traditional Russian round-robin series of toasts. When this parade finally ended at the head the table, the host asked me to speak on his behalf. Just a little in my cups, and having nothing un-foolish to say right off the top of my head, I steadied myself and reached into my inside pocket and pulled out my trusty Cato Institute edition of the Constitution, and read from it aloud, more specifically, Jefferson’s famous lines of the Declaration, one slow phrase at a time, so it could be translated. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
At the time I didn’t know these words by heart, but I do now.
What happened next is why.
Common words to many Americans, I swear, I don’t think any of those Soviet professors had ever heard them before, for upon finishing, I looked up to see every person assembled crying, tears pouring down their cheeks. There wasn’t a single smug been-there-heard-that look in the crowd. (I expect maybe the vodka helped.) Then after we had eaten, three of the professors, continuing a constitutional Q & A begun before the meal, rushed up to say “Mister, Mister, now we understand Amerika Constitution. Is simple…even Ivan Ivanovich (the Russian Homer Simpson) can pursue life, liberty, happiness without permission of state.” (Emphasis mine …and theirs.)
Out of the mouth of babes, huh? But scholar-babes…who could get to the nub of a proposition in a blink of an eye…and yet be humbled by a simple truth when they discovered it for the first time. When do we ever see that in Amerika anymore?
One of the most moving events in my life, I felt like I had been witness to a visitation, only am still not sure who educated who on this visit to the law professor’s cottage in the village.
Sadly, to many Americans, those words by Jefferson are as chestnut as “Ohsaycanyouseebythedawnsearlylight”. Eyes glaze over. And now there are the GenZ’s, who increasingly have never heard those words at all, in part because they never asked, nor has anyone bothered to explain the American theology of liberty to them in the first place.
Since then I’ve come to learn what I’ve suspected for many years now, namely that some well-educated men and women, people who have read all the books, and even proclaim themselves “conservative”, haven’t any earthly clue as to what “American conservatism” really means, or what its purpose is.
What I have learned may be illuminating to those seeking guidance on how to deal with the rift between “corporate conservatism” and the “native conservatism of the people”. Much has been written about it of late, and much of it is wrong.
The Parable of the Parallel
The simplicity of Jefferson’s truths, and their ability to overpower even the super-educated, if their hearts are “in the trim”, is what makes certain truths transcendent, which, once learned, can be re-born as if brand new.
The lines between the Front Office and the Front Lines are well established, but because of transcendence, exceptions can be found in both Christianity and Human Interactions.
It’s been said about Christianity that it grows one soul at a time by a process of a few simple truths being reborn in a single being. This is how it has re-birthed itself for over two thousand years. These truths never lose their ability to stand the hair up on the back of one’s neck, or to make your heart leap for joy, especially when we see others discover it for the first time…unless you are not extra selfish or cynical, as I think many of you now may be. It renews our/your own faith as you watch a new star being born. If you’re a regular church-goer you know what I mean.
Truth is literally re-born all over again, new and fresh. Thus, it can forever renew itself, which is why, for almost 1500 years, when Muslims have swung swords over the heads of infidels, saying “Recant and accept Islam or die”, there are always young Christians no more than 20 years old, who will still offer up their necks and refuse. Such is the power of this transcendence.
I like to think there are still Americans who will refuse to recant the Doctrine of Liberty under similar inducements, but I am no longer sure, based on the language used by young people at political rallies or on my “X” comments from @ElonMusk and dozens others, such as @GenFlynn.
But you have to look at the simplicity of this American theology, and our doctrine of liberty, to understand how such people can exist, and why they feel they should hate it, just to gain the acceptance of a crowd the wish to join, or remain in-the-gang. But first, you have to know to look for it, and where to look for it. This is supposed to be foundational in understanding logical thinking, for the great ideas of liberty are transmitted in the same manner. Becoming a liberty-lover is not dissimilar for it also touches a primal need inside all mankind. Christ promised spiritual liberty while the American Constitution provides men with the freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness “without the permission of the state”.
If you can’t acknowledge that your ability to even recognize these things, your wiring has been cut, or you are too vain, or lazy, perhaps sated and overfed, to even look yourself in the mirror. If you don’t know right from wrong, or can’t tell, you need to talk with someone. A parent, a best friend, maybe even a minister or a priest.
And you need to be shown where to find it, then shown how to restore it. Maybe you can do this on your own, but only if you recognize what you’ve lost, and the importance of looking for it. You may need help…which is why I post these short discussions for free.
Not that long ago, so powerful was this right that men would fight, in rolled-up sleeves, defending a Constitution they had never read, or in many cases, were unable to read. They only knew it by name. They simply knew it was the source of their freedoms.
Today in America men and women still fall at the altar of freedom without once having to resort to a catechism, or a handbook, to guide them to this new freedom that has been revealed to them.
It’s the same thing, just different wings of the spiritual universe.
So, how does the native conservatism of the people stand against the conservatism of its priesthood? Who is the “reason for the season” here?
Christ was executed (Fact) and then arose and ascended into heaven (This is Belief, so you don’t have to believe this part, even though the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming), and then 10 days later 120 men and women departed Jerusalem headed in 120 different directions to preach the story of what they had personally known of this Man. (Again, Fact). What is also fact is that they took no textbooks with them, as the Gospels would be some years in the writing, Saints Peter and James had not yet written their story, and St Paul was still running around persecuting Christians under his Roman name, Saul.
(And most of them were martyred, again Fact, which proves they weren’t scamming a bogus product.
So, what message did these first missionaries carry orally to the far-flung world? Christianity began with 120 versions of eyewitnesses to Christ’s sermons so in all likelihood none of those 120 versions were exactly the same. In fact, we know they weren’t because different opinions arose almost immediately. The first century of church fathers and scholars were curious and inquiring and devout, using the best evidence available to settle disputes, and trying to create an orderliness to the intellectual chaos. Still, by the 4th Century, hundreds of different interpretations of Christ’s words had been created and each taking hold of new ground they refused to concede.
The makings of a corporate church was taking shape in Nicaea in 325 AD, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing at the beginning. In fact, it was a natural progression of man’s intellect and his need to collate, standardize and organize. What we know is that, beginning at Nicea, eventually the corporate church went one way, toward what students of organizational schemes now know to be a series of historical crucibles that define its rise in strength and protection, a long period of bureaucratic consolidation, and then a kind of collapse…all according to fixed laws of bureaucracies, and which, in almost all human enterprises, saps the transcendent idea that started it in the first place right out of the enterprise.
This has happened with the travel of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, first to the working class readers, then to the delegates at Independence Hall, then to Thomas Jefferson’s skilled pen, and the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. If you don’t remember American History…first, you’ve been cheated, for that Declaration was a doozy;
We’re see
But note, that while the corporate church was heading in one direction, the corpus of the church, the parishes, where the common people lived, largely continued on their original course, one soul at a time. And for two thousand years, the essence of that message, often called the Good News, was heard and understood by millions despite the variations in its telling, even as attempts were made in the front office to create doctrine and rites as unbending and orthodox as an EPA regulation, including a full menu of sanctions against those who strayed off the reservation.
So, predictably, the corporatization of the Church occurred in phases. At Nicaea, having arrived at a “consensus” (250 churches of approximately 3500 invitees actually showing up to vote) the Church first declared itself to be The Universal One True Church, then decided what was “canonical” (what could go into the New Testament and what could not), then granted itself the power to excommunicate dissident churches. At this early point at least, this was just a paper exercise, for those dissident churches were unfazed inasmuch as the Church had not yet obtained a blam stick with any kind of long reach.
Then, in 800 AD it got one, when the Church inked a power-sharing agreement with the king-system of Europe by crowning Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor. Still, fully half of Christendom lay outside the reach of the Roman Church in Europe, but, blam stick fully in its grasp, the Church no longer had to dilly-dally with dissidents within its territories and began burning people at the stake as if they were cordwood.
So, there was no more need to bother with scholarly disputations, although, if the record of the trial of Joan of Arc is any indication, Church tribunals had become excessively rigid and unbending, not to mention tedious and long-winded, especially when they were driving toward a pre-determined outcome, based on political considerations (uniformity and control) and not Church law. All sorts of sects disappeared completely over these five-six hundred years, undoing half a millennium of scholarship and shared piety. Finally, on the corporate Church’s watch Mankind was also jailed into feudalism, making the 99%’s (their Homer Simpsons) physical life worse than it ever was at the time of Christ, thus making their quest for spiritual freedom even more problematic.
If the Devil were in charge of this circus you’d have to say it looked like he was winning. I’ve found that the Devil’s organizing message, while unable to succeed for more than three generations (100 years) will still postpone Nature’s (and God’s) plan a century. I can see a heavier hand cutting through the red tape of post-modern management thinking and restoring the handshakes of understanding to last no more than a generation.
If any of this sounds familiar it’s because the Church followed the path of kings, and every kingdom that has come down the pike since the pharaohs, even the enlightened ones, and every corporation, no matter how much better they designed the 8-cylnder engine. No one ever did a real study, but by the 14th Century, fewer than half the clergy were even religious, including a few popes. And the common man and woman were so beaten down and poor they were unable to make personal decisions about God that did not include fear.
Christ’s simple message had gotten much less simple. Still some of Christianity’s greatest giants lived in those days; creating the monastic orders, which saved western civilization and scholarship in the darkest of days, and saving the Church at important turns, (Catherine of Siena) and everywhere there were friars who shepharded their flocks just as they had done since the 1st century. (Historians, for reason not pertinent to this discussion, but always front-office and king-centered, overlook these essential building blocks altogether, just as modern corporate conservatism now overlooks its own roots.
For you see, the Christian Church didn’t go the way of the Bourbons, or General Motors, although the modern debauchery of the Roman Church and its front office has put its front lines at risk. The whole Church had something corporations and top-down governments don’t have, and it’s that transcendent fire that never really goes out at its base. So, in the early 16th Century, outlier churches rebelled, both over the arrogance and suffocating power of the Church, but also its doctrine, only rescuing it instead of burying it. All those 1st Century variations of the Good News hadn’t been killed off after all. It was called the Reformation, and insofar as the history of the “churches in America” is concerned, saved the Catholic Church, for the passion of its parishes here defines it, not its corporate front office.
Sidebar: It was during this period that America was first incubated (1607), and I wonder if any of you can see a connection? (Go re-read Larry Schweikart’s Patriot’s History of the United States in this context.)
