Seemingly, there's little connection overtly between the moral difficulty of the Roberts nomination and the war (allegedly) on terror. But both situations are reflecting a key national need, symptoms of the national malaise, both of which have, I'm afraid, similar solutions.
What is the problem with Roberts? He is a man who is from deeply within the system. He is a creature hermetically embedded in the present state of our legal moral confusion. Yet he is the candidate who, in Bush's and Tony Perkin's mind, is going to be the pro-family, pro-life messianic judge to bring about the conservatism that was promised by these and other people long ago in a primary far, far away. We have trouble believing Mr. Bush and Mr. Perkins because we know what we are looking at: more of the same – institutionals preserving their influence and station. True, it's much closer to being what we want than anything we've had before, but it's still not enough. Why?
What is the problem with the war on terror? There are new rules and regulations. There are nominal immigration restrictions. There are police in the New York subway. Some things are different. We continue to shoot 12 AK-47 toting jihadists from Yemen in the Afghan mountains every seven or eight weeks. We continue to bomb an al-Qaida car bomb factory or two in Iraq once every nine weeks. We are constantly told that it is the bad apples of Islam who are causing the ruckus, a tiny minority of an otherwise peaceful population, and we are dealing with that minority. Yet, somehow that group gets worse and worse and more numerous and is apologized for in a wide press.
In M.C. Escher's work, there is a famous piece called, "Mobius Strip." It's a picture of ants walking a strip of paper as it were. The paper is looped once and twisted once so as to form a torsioned ring. The ants walk round and round it believing that they are rising up and out, cresting hills and climbing grades. But in reality, they never break out. They are pressed to the page, trapped in a loop which feels better, but which is not the transcendance they desperately desire. They have the impression – but not the fact of – escape.
Roberts cannot shatter the moral evil of abortion because he loves, believes and is a man of precedent. What has been said before dictates, for him, largely what will be said next. He is allowed, in his mind and by his fraternity, to build on, to keep continuous with the system. The future state is only allowed to be a linear extrapolation of the present because this is all the ethic of preserving one's sense of normality will allow. A change that leaps beyond – that cuts the Mobius Strip and sends the ants spilling out of the page – is beyond what the Senate will confirm, it is beyond what plays in Roberts' mind, insufficient to turn our way of government to one that is transcendently moral.
Bush cannot shatter the moral evil of radicalist and terroristic Islamism because liberal America cannot conceive of a religious sect that is simply bad, wrong. Mr. Bush has carried us to the highest heights of the Strip and stretched it to its breaking point – but hasn't done the necessary work of snapping the rubber band. The American assaults on "terror" have been done within the moral consciousness and framework that existed prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
As frantic as we have been to preserve our rights to not have FBI agents reviewing our library books, we have not been equally frantic to adopt the humility of mind that leads to new, objective adjustments in thinking. Stupidly, we continue to drone these Western mantras: desperate people are driven to suicide bombing by poverty, lack of education, and the frustration of foreign occupation. Terror is an ideology of hatred by cold killers, blah, blah, blah.
No, these things are moral notions that Americans accepted on Sept. 10, 2001, and they have been carried to their utter endpoints. They can do no more for us. They extend artificial limitations when taking the fight to the enemy because they do not conceive the enemy in accurate, objective, moral and motivational terms. They can do no more for us because they keep us ants on the Strip. But they can really do no more for us chiefly because they are flat wrong.
And what do you do with a system that leaves within itself absolutely no further opportunity for transcendance? The framers built into the Constitution and observed in the religious consciousness of the people various escape hatches that were to spring open and allow the ants to burst forth from the cyclical prisons. These institutional escapes have been largely welded shut from within by the institution which seeks to preserve itself (a state judge in Florida openly holds Congress in contempt and keeps his job?). Indeed, we have become like a packed nightclub with its emergency exit doors chained shut by a greedy management intent on preserving its own profit at the expense of the very lives of its patrons.
Who or what, then, shall breach the surly bonds of Earth? To touch the face of God?
Either He from without, or His people from within, must shatter what allows itself today only to be stretched. The opportunities and choices remaining dwindle. We must either radically smash our present lying national moral assumptions ourselves or our nation will be struck from without and shattered with far less discriminating force and aim. In either case, we must recognize the present system as doomed and ourselves as people of action in the new creation of something higher.
"'Is not my Word like a hammer?' says the Lord."
Andrew Longman is a Christian by confession and an applied scientist by trade.