In the last installment, we looked a bit at the mantra of “never forget”, and how, I think, this leads to problems, for when we remember in a simple fashion, we are never able to disentangle that which should be remembered from that which should be repented of. We think of the past event--which should be remembered--and the future that it brought about as a single action, and are thus bound to never be able to remember the past with anything like gratitude, but only pain.
But the present failures can also lead us to devalue the past memory as well: our hatred of what a relationship has become tempting us to think there was never anything but rot there, a parent who fails in their latter years is viewed as always having headed that way. My earliest published work was on the Theology of John Howard Yoder, a figure whose work finds itself caught up in this question of gratitude and failure for many readers impacted by his work.
For me, this dynamic of memory, gratitude, and distinguishing past from present has been coming home with respect to many of the voices whose witness has become altered in the weirdness and polarity of two years of a pandemic. In a recent piece in First Things, Peter Leithart, like Rusty Reno the week before, takes a contrarian position on vaccine mandates, arguing that those who have natural immunity shouldn’t have to be vaccinated. There’s a fair argument to be made here: vaccines are meant to mimic natural immunity, though it’s unclear at the present how long said natural immunity lasts, particularly if one contracted COVID early on. As a riposte to Leithart, it’s not as if, having contracted a virus once, I’m immune from contracting it ever again. But this question about natural immunity is one which can be reasonably argued about.
What was disappointing in Leithart’s piece was the manner in which he, like Reno before him, sees in this question a more nefarious connection to the biopoliticization of life, ans this casts the calls for vaccine mandates as part of a cosmic struggle. Leithart puts it this way, on why he hasn’t gotten vaccinated after having been infected last year:
I oppose vaccine mandates because I want to do my small part to gum up the works. I don’t mean the works of the Biden administration, but the much larger global trend toward biopolitical technocracy. As Roberto Esposito put it in Biopolitics, political authority was traditionally the authority to kill. Under the reign of biopolitics, rulers care for and manage life. Once upon a time, the ruler bore a sword; now, a syringe.
The reference to “biopolitics” is by now not a new one. Michel Foucault first introduced the language, picked up and reworked by countless theorists since, with a simple thesis: politics is primarily concerned with the management of not just human organizations, but with bios itself. Again, there’s something to this. Think here of the real lessons (not the superficial ones about red-scare socialism) of something like 1984 and Brave New World: if you can control the physical, biological conditions of human behavior, you can engineer a society. And so, for Leithart, opposing the mandate is a way of opposing something which should be opposed: the biopolitical organization of human existence. His piece here is of a piece with other arguments that he has made for months in this vein, through social media and through other articles.
The problem is that Leithart, like Reno, and like so many other examples on questions ranging from whether a church should be able to gather, to whether kids should mask in schools, forgets that principles operate with prudence: a principle cannot stand on its own, but has to be enacted in a particular way and in a particular time. It’s not courageous, Aquinas says, to run into the field of battle, one man against the world like Jon Snow: that’s just being rash. Similarly, to oppose biopolitics through opposing the requirement of a vaccine with large, attested efficacy is imprudent: the mandate fits the scope of the issue at stake.
Here’s where disappointment and memory come in, though. If Leithart were just some guy, that’d be one thing, but for years, Leithart has been a stalwart in the theological and pastoral world: he’s produced some really insightful work, and devoted himself to the teaching of pastors. This is someone who loves Christ and the church.
And so, the gravity of the past and his present behavior on this point create a tension between the gifts he has brought in the past and the tension that has with the present. His large scale influence cuts both ways, and in this case, I think, does damage proportionate to his influence.
Exercising memory well requires remembering the gifts of the past, and in the face of present imprudence, not discarding that. Imprudence can signal a departure in the future toward a distant land that is unrecognizable to us, but it does not have to. The prodigal heads off to distant lands, but does so only because of the father’s money, and so it is with us: our departures are never breaks with God, but in some sense, only possible because of the gifts of God, however ill used.
Leithart has a large following, a prominent influence, and so his words will be heard and read, and not in prudent ways, I fear: the words we write and the things we teach must be said carefully, in measured ways, because not everyone reads between our lines. Not everyone will remember that Leithart wrote a good book about idolatry, and what he wrote in that book this may very well be consistent with his actions here. Not everyone will remember that Leithart spent years writing on the ways literature forms us to be virtuous, and that this may be what is happening here, even I take his exercise of virtue to be misguided here. Forgetting all of those past gifts gives me a bad present vision, and negates the hope that this too might be undone.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t grieve the public misstep of another Christian luminary. But lives are long and memories must be as well, particularly if I am to have hope that my own errors will be remembered in light of past faithfulness.