It's Not a Place, It's a Pathology

Joseph P. Duggan

In the precincts of Coyoacán near to where Leon Trotsky caught the business end of an ice pick sprawls a monument to Big Government and the delirium of National Greatness if not to any certifiable species of conservatism. This is the "Behemoth U." of Russell Kirk's nightmares, an endless vulgar-Marxist bull session 200,000 voices strong in a jumble of boxy buildings consecrated by and to "The Big Three" -- not Detroit carmakers but extravagant muralists of high-church Stalinism and neo-pagan chic -- Siqueiros, Rivera, Orozco. Here Lillian Hellman's heart could have been at home. Certainly not the City College of New York, this is UNAM, Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México.

Depending on the audience, UNAM's publicity machine presents alternative founding dates. For those (especially those with fat checkbooks) who might cherish the Permanent Things, UNAM says it is the second-oldest university in the Western Hemisphere, founded in 1551 -- when Madrid sent over the charter for the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico. For those who consider the Spanish and Catholic heritage a yoke of oppression, the university traces its origin to 1910 and the ignition of the Mexican Revolution. The latter account is more accurate, since President Benito Juárez and his anti-clerical Reforma in 1867 had shuttered forever the old Pontifical National University. The true UNAM opened in 1910 during the dying light of the Díaz dictatorship's "positivism" and the dawning rays of Mexican-style Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, and other radical intellectual fads hanging onto the tumbrels of the Revolution.

Behemoth universities allow, like exotic hothouse plants, occasional exceptions to radical and socialist conformity. Milton Friedman and Saul Bellow were tolerated for a while at Wisconsin-Madison, while California-Berkeley permitted the conservative scholar George Lenczowski to thrive. William F. Buckley, Jr., and Octavio Paz studied at UNAM but did not graduate. In more characteristic fashion, José López Portillo and a succession of other big-government Mexican presidents and party bosses graduated and launched their careers from the UNAM law school.

In UNAM's center for juridical research toils a youthful, gentle, but animated scholar of classical and Spanish literature, philology, economics, and Roman law, Juan Javier del Granado. He is circumspect about his work. "If they" -- the university establishment -- "knew what I was up to, they might hang me from a lamppost."

What Del Granado is up to is an attempt to rehabilitate, after centuries in the intellectual demimonde, Latin American jurisprudence. Del Granado is a political refugee from Bolivia, where his family for centuries has been prominent in literary circles and the Church. He cannot bear to live under the regime of Evo Morales, and so for the time being, he is plotting a sort of counter-subversion in the shadow of the masterpiece murals of Social Realism.

He speaks with the enthusiasm of a detoured pilgrim dizzy from the trek to what he mistook for Compostela, or maybe of a Christian missionary to Borneo, or of St. Paul on the Areopagus. "Everything wrong with law in Latin America," he says, surveying the Ciudad Universitaria with a believer's gleam in his eye, "began here."

Whatever seeds he plants in Mexico he will have to return from the United States to cultivate. In the fall he will begin an appointment in the genial setting of George Mason University in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. He explains that Washington offers an indispensable base for Latin American legal studies because the Library of Congress houses by far the best collection of his region's legal books, exceeding anything available in Mexico or South America.

Del Granado is trained in both the Hispano-Catholic humanist/natural law tradition and the University of Chicago law-and-economics school. He maintains that they are compatible, even meant for one another. In terms that lawyers probably will understand better than this writer and other members of the laity, he says that Latin America suffers from an emphasis on "public law" with government as the central player, to the near exclusion of "private law" mediating between private parties.

"The private sector," he writes, "cannot exist in a vacuum. Private law enables the private sector to be the main driver of the economy. Understanding how a system of private law works is relevant for economic liberalization. Unfortunately, Latin American countries liberalized and privatized their economies in the 1990s, forgetting that their legal systems had been socialized and constitutionalized during much of the 20th century. Arguing for a return to Roman law is the best way to introduce law and economics into the civil law tradition and to reprivatize Latin America's ailing legal system."

The Bolivian scholar is quick to say "Yanqui go home" when it comes to United States regulatory law. "Latin Americans look at U.S. regulatory law as the most significant legal advance that can be imported from the North. Even Richard Posner now says we need a little more regulation. Nothing could be further from the truth! Regulatory law is an aberration of United States history."

Del Granado has many comrades in his school of thought, organized in the Latin American and Caribbean Law and Economics Association, known by its Spanish acronym, ALACDE. Those who want to delve deeper into the work of this organization and its members may find a wealth of information in English at this website.

Roger Fontaine, who directed Latin American policy for Ronald Reagan in the National Security Council, now teaches at the Institute of World Politics. Every semester he begins his regional studies course with the world-weary observation: "Latin America is not a place. It's a pathology."

Juan Javier del Granado dreams of transforming Latin America into a place -- a place where foundations of law as understood by Cicero and Aquinas can foster prosperity and ordered liberty.

Originally published by The American Spectator
Mr. Duggan is a visiting professor in the Estado de México campus of Tecnológico de Monterrey, one of the participating institutions in ALACDE.

Same Old

David Warren

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This brilliant and original idea struck me early yesterday morning, as I was sifting through a pile of old books, trying to decide which should be consigned to the laundry room, given shelving limitations in my ivory tower. The book I picked up was admirably thin: bound in boards, but only 30 pages. It was written by Bruce Hutchison (1901-92), deservedly among the most respected (and therefore feared) Canadian journalists through many decades.

The book, or rather tract, was entitled Canada's Lonely Neighbour. This refers, of course, to the United States. It was published near the time I was born, which is to say, now, a long time ago. It was the product of extensive travelling in Europe, and of reflection on Canada's situation as a kind of middleman between Britain and Europe on the one side, and the U.S. on the other: allies that secretly loathe each other. I will return to this point in a moment.

But meanwhile I cannot resist a comment on the style of the book itself. It is written, as all the Hutchison books I recall, in a very personal way, replete with anecdotes of the sort that today's "professional journalist" might eschew, for they strip through the false veneer of a mechanical "objectivity." There is not a page on which some rather astute observation is not made, of the sort that can't be restricted to politics, in any narrow sense. There is warmth, empathy, drollness, humility; but also there is hard bone. Hutchison was never a coward: he came from that old Canada, in which you did not apologize for independent views.

There is, for instance, a famous anecdote (so famous that it has survived into the age of Internet), from 1952. Hutchison had made remarks in the daily he then edited -- the Victoria Times -- that so outraged members of the British Columbia legislature, they demanded an apology from his publisher. Hutchison responded by reprinting the offending editorial on the front page the next day, "in case anyone had missed it."

One is reminded of him, today, by Canadian journalists such as Ezra Levant, or Mark Steyn, who, though their personalities may vary, nevertheless share that stiff-necked quality. Levant's new book -- Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights -- puts everything on the line in the way the best Canadian journalists always did. (I recommend that book without reservation: it delivers exactly what it promises, and every voter needs to know.)

So, in that sense nothing has changed. The nobility, or rather potential nobility, of the journalistic vocation remains. The only thing that has changed is that today the honest journalist can be hauled before human rights commissions and press councils, and pursued ruinously through the courts with lawsuits so frivolous that they would once have been tossed out on sight. There is no bottom to the cultural and intellectual degradation that "political correctness" can achieve, and no end to the tyranny it heralds.

But all that was an aside. What I instead wished to bring, to my reader's attention this morning, is Bruce Hutchison's observations on the phenomenon of anti-Americanism, circa 1954. From his first page he refers to "the dry rot, something intangible developing within the minds of nameless millions, that is steadily undermining the friendship of the old world and the new, on which the fate of both must hang."

Plus ça change. What Hutchison goes on to describe -- the European perception of Americans as crass, childish, stupid, dangerous; and the reciprocal American perception of Europeans as profoundly ungrateful hypocrites and snobs -- is still with us.

Moreover, the "root cause" seems still to be what Hutchison believed. For immediately below the surface he found a remarkable inability to understand each other, masked by the illusion of sharing the same broad culture. Europe draws a wicked caricature of America; America's cartoon Europe is a preposterous fairy tale.

But deeper still, he found the European hypocrisy a greater obstacle even to its self-understanding than the American resentment of it. For here was an entire continent that had become, through terrible wars, morally confused and dysfunctional, even while it contained great numbers of vigorous, able and, indeed, very civilized people.

Hutchison said things were getting worse, and might require a miracle to reverse; but that the cure "will not be found in the present attempt to hush up the unpleasant truth by diplomatic postures, after-dinner oratory and transatlantic cargoes of soft soap." These remain the cures proposed, and on view once again this last week at the G20 summit.

The current popularity of President Barack Obama in Europe is another mask: Europeans adore him because they think he shares their "sophisticated" contempt for the American people.

But the full antipathy will soon re-emerge, as it did after the brief time-out that was last provided by the events of 9/11. Meanwhile, Obama may soon learn the unfortunate political truth: that his predecessor was wiser to play to American, rather than European, prejudices.

The Fool

Padraic Pearse (n. Pádraig Mac Piarais, 1879-1916)

The son of an Irish mother and an English father, he was born at 27 Gt. Brunswick St., (now Pearse St.) in Dublin and educated at the Christian Brothers' School. He graduated from the Royal University and became a barrister, but he was an enthusiastic student of the Irish language. He became a writer in both English and Gaelic. Pearse envisioned a free Gaelic Ireland and founded St. Enda's College, a school for boys.

After visiting the United States he joined the Irish Volunteers and was commander-in-chief of the Irish rebel forces in the Easter Rebellion of 1916. He realised the rebel situation was hopeless and ordered his troops to surrender to the British. He was arrested with several other leaders (including his brother) and shot.

Too often, we discover that one of Irelands timelessly well known writers was part of the rebellion. Of course, too often, they were executed. What works may have been created that would delight us today; had they only lived to write them.

The Fool

Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men's mouths;
A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost, nor recked if another reaped
The fruit of his mighty sowing, content to scatter the seed;
A fool that is unrepentant, and that soon at the end of all
Shall laugh in his lonely heart as the ripe ears fall to the reaping-hooks
And the poor are filled that were empty,
Tho' he go hungry.
I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth
In attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil.

Was it folly or grace? Not men shall judge me, but God.
I have squandered the splendid years:
Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again,
Aye, fling them from me !
For this I have heard in my heart, that a man shall scatter, not hoard,
Shall do the deed of to-day, nor take thought of to-morrow's teen,
Shall not bargain or huxter with God ; or was it a jest of Christ's
And is this my sin before men, to have taken Him at His word?
The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces,
And said, `This man is a fool,' and others have said, `He blasphemeth;'
And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life
In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things,
To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold.

O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?
What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell
In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?
Lord, I have staked my soul, I have staked the lives of my kin
On the truth of Thy dreadful word. Do not remember my failures,
But remember this my faith
And so I speak.
Yea, ere my hot youth pass, I speak to my people and say:
Ye shall be foolish as I; ye shall scatter, not save;
Ye shall venture your all, lest ye lose what is more than all;
Ye shall call for a miracle, taking Christ at His word.
And for this I will answer, O people, answer here and hereafter,
O people that I have loved, shall we not answer together?

Pádraig Mac Piarais

A Cowardly Man

Ian Hunter

Pontius Pilate was an appeaser; a man who preferred avoiding trouble even if it meant avoiding the truth; a man, sad to say, much like me.

Through 40 days of Lenten observance, Christians metaphorically follow the footsteps of Christ along the Via Dolorosa, the path from the Garden of Gethsemane -- where Christ prayed that if it were possible he might be spared the cup of suffering; "Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done" -- to the place of a skull, called Golgotha, where what awaited Jesus was the cruelest form of execution the Romans had devised, a cross.

For Catholics, the path is followed by praying the Stations of the Cross, perhaps the most moving liturgy in all the Church. Whenever I read the passion narrative, or hear it read aloud, I am always struck by the ambivalent role of one man, the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate -- a name of infamy for two millennia. But what does Pilate really connote? The Church has had trouble answering that question.

In most provinces of Christendom, Pilate is reviled as a corrupt judge, one who despite Jesus' manifest innocence condemned him to death. But this has not been a universal view: The Coptic Church considers Pilate more favourably, while in the Abyssinian Church he has been canonized, Saint Pontius Pilate. Why these sharply disparate views?

In part because the Gospel accounts themselves differ. The earliest Gospel, Mark, depicts Jesus as mute before Pilate who perfunctorily hands him over to be crucified. Matthew depicts Pilate vacillating, particularly after his wife has a dream of Jesus and warns her husband to "have nothing to do with that innocent man." When Pilate cannot persuade the mob, he publicly washes his hands and tells them that he is innocent "of the blood of this just man." Luke's Gospel says that Pilate was so anxious to avoid condemning Jesus that, on learning that Jesus was a Galilean, Pilate "remitted the case to Herod." But Herod, "that fox," (as Jesus once called him) was not so easily outwitted; Herod questioned Jesus, scourged him and then sent him right back to Pilate.

But it is John's Gospel which gives the most detailed and fascinating portrait of Christ before Pilate. John describes a lengthy, civil discourse, in the course of which Jesus gives an extraordinary answer to Pilate's question: "Are you a king?" Jesus says: "To this end was I born and for this purpose came I into the world that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." Jesus implies here that in all times and places, there will be a party of truth-seekers who will be drawn inexorably to his words. This is both a prophesy and an unassailable statement of fact. And Pilate, no fool he, then says: "What is truth?"

We do not know what happened to Pontius Pilate. We know that his procuratorship in Judea lasted from 26 to 36 A.D., and came to an end just around the time of the crucifixion. In his annals, the Roman historian Tacitus says that Pilate was later recalled to Rome.

Many fanciful stories have been spun about Pilate's later conversion, even martyrdom. But the truth is that Pilate just disappears from the historical record. I suspect that if, in later life, Pilate had been asked about Jesus of Nazareth he might scarcely have remembered him; only one crucifixion, after all, among many.

In Pontius Pilate we see not a stupid man (he asked the right question), not even a deluded man ("I find no fault in him"), but rather a cowardly man: a man who having glimpsed the truth (the prisoner's innocence) nevertheless yielded to political pressure. What will Herod think? What will the chief priests do? Will the mob riot if I don't give in? With such fears, rather than with the truth in mind, Pilate delivered up Jesus to be crucified.

How often we emulate Pilate, by preferring the politically correct to the true answer. Some churches even emulate Pilate. The church must not offend women; so hymnals and liturgies are ransacked in search of any word or phrase that might possibly give offence. The church must not offend homosexuals; therefore its historic teaching is suddenly stood on its head. The church must be open to change; and before long a new-age pantheism replaces worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

What sort of man was Pontius Pilate? An appeaser; a man who preferred avoiding trouble even if it meant avoiding the truth; a man, sad to say, much like me.