Experience at AHI's WAPONS

This summer, I had the pleasure to participate in the Alexander Hamilton Institute’s Washington Program on National Security (WAPONS), led by AHI Senior Fellow Dr. Juliana Pilon. During our week and a half in D.C., the fourteen of us met with experts in various fields. We focused on a wide range of topics at the forefront of national security discussions, including digital infrastructure for the financial sectors and its implications for national security, technology and security in a geopolitical context, the Senate and defense funding, and North Korea’s use of hybrid warfare against the United States, to name a few. Yet despite these practical, comprehensive offerings, what I took away from WAPONS was more profound and personal than our fascinating lessons about national security.

One example came early in the week, during the question-and- answer part of our meeting with Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. During the Q&A, a student asked Mr. Gonzalez what advice he had, given the tumultuous times we live in. He suggested that when you encounter something you feel passionate about, or that is especially compelling to you, think of it as God whispering in your ear that you should do it. Initially I didn’t think much of this advice, but I found it meant a lot more later in the week.

A few days after our session with Mr. Gonzalez, we met with Yang Jianli, a Chinese dissident and human rights activist. Dr. Yang described his participation in the famous protest at Tiananmen Square in 1989, fleeing to the United States immediately afterward, then returning in 2002, when he was arrested and imprisoned until 2007. He also recounted a very recent story. On the Tiananmen anniversary just a few days before we met, a woman in Beijing climbed a skyscraper, waved an American flag, and dropped pamphlets with the Declaration of Independence. The story further captivated us. In every other presentation, students were fidgeting, looking at their hands, or taking notes. When Dr. Yang spoke, all of us were mesmerized for the entire 40-minute talk.

I felt a reawakened passion, last experienced in my childhood enthusiasm for fighter jets after watching the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds fly over my neighborhood. Now, with the Chinese dissident’s emotionally powerful history, I felt a new, passionate draw to serve the country whose values many others can only dream of being able to live under in their homelands. If others without America’s freedoms are (as Yang showed us) prepared to die to obtain them, I feel the least I can do is work to maintain those principles so they remain not just an aspiration for others, but a vibrant reality, as they are or should be for us. After speaking together, a few of my fellow students shared that feeling. One has just become a newly commissioned Army intelligence officer.

After hearing Mike Gonzalez’s advice and Yang Jianli’s moving stories thanks to the unrivaled opportunities to encounter such perspectives that Dr. Robert Paquette’s AHI and Dr. Pilon’s WAPONS offered us, I have come to believe it’s my calling, as cheesy as it may sound, to serve my country and fly for the military. I’ll take that as a whisper.

French Secularism and the Law of 1905

The French law of separation between church and state is one of the most concrete steps in the development of French secularism (“laïcité”), which remains a defining characteristic of the country today. During the French Revolution of 1789, the rise of secularism spurred a “de-Christianization” (“dechristianisation”), leading to a decrease in the power and omnipresence of the Catholic Church in society. With Napoleon's seizure of power in 1799, many old traditions were upset: both the shift from Monarchy to Empire and Napoleon’s symbolic coronation ceremony (in which he crowned himself in lieu of the Pope doing so) created a perception of the State as equal to the Church. Lastly, Napoleon’s Concordat agreement of 1801 with the Vatican was not well-received in his Catholic country, a reaction that helped lay the path to the secular society that would take hold, and still persists today.

Another large contributor to the rise in secularity and in anti-Catholic sentiments was the increase in publicly educated citizens. Long after Napoleon I, during the “guerre scolaire” (school war) of the 1870s, the French state began to build free, secular public schools to compete with the country’s traditional Catholic schools. In 1881, the Ferry laws, named for the prime minister of the time, required school for all children, forcing poorer children who would otherwise have been in the labor force to attend public, secular schools. Moreover, by encouraging the education of girls in public schools, the government began to shape mothers, families, and citizens without religion. Then, in 1894, the Dreyfus Affair completely disrupted the Third Republic, polarizing a society which was already cracking in two. After the intense media coverage of the Dreyfus Affair, and thanks to the very high rates of literacy and education of that time, “popular front secularism” began: a widespread anticlericalism. Criticisms of luxury and lust in the Church, and suspicions that it was corrupt, spread throughout society with the help of yellow journalism and an increasingly educated population. Because of these scandals, Protestants began to push for a smaller and poorer Catholic Church. 

By the early 1900s, French society was nearing the end of a long-anticipated change. Many public officials realized that the damaged relations between the Church and the State were irreversible and pushed for a complete “divorce” of the two entities. Progressives were generally in favor of the separation, with support from anti-monarchists (known as Republicans) varying, and little support from Catholics. The main principle leading to the law’s passage was that it allowed religion to continue to be exercised without interruption. After about four years of Senate and lower house negotiations, the famous 1905 law, the Separation of Church and State, was enacted. 

Its first article emphasizes that the Republic “guarantees the free exercise of worship,” ensuring that religions are not prohibited in France. The second article, the most important one in terms of change, says the “Republic does not recognize, does not pay, nor does not subsidize any worship.” This revolutionary article forced the Church to become a smaller and less powerful entity due to diminished financial resources. It also broke Napoleon’s Concordat agreement of 1801, which declared Catholicism the majority religion of France and guaranteed state support of the Church. 

After the law’s passage, some Catholics said “acceptance of the separation would be a humiliating capitulation,” and that because the Concordat was an agreement between two entities, one must consult the other before it could be nullified. Of course, the friendly relations between the Vatican and France were also disturbed: Pope Pius X condemned the rupture, saying it was not compatible with the Church. Others raised the possibility of the law's harmful effects on the Republic by giving the Church total freedom of maneuver.

An interesting exception to the law of separation is the region of Alsace-Moselle, which was under German control in 1905. When it returned to France in 1919, it kept its German laws and did not adopt the principle of secularism. And even today, it is not a secular region like the rest of France: the government of Alsace pays the salaries of its ministers of worship. The situation in Alsace is a subject of debate and controversy now, because it is in direct contradiction to the concept of secularism and the law of 1905. 

Even in the rest of France, the law of 1905 is frequently challenged, in particular on its compatibility with Islam, the second-most practiced religion in France. The law prohibits any demonstration of religious affiliation in public schools, including wearing a cross necklace or a hijab. It has been criticized for unfairly targeting members of the Muslim community, as their religious practice of wearing a hijab is much more evident than those of Christians, whose religious symbols do not stand out as readily. Though the law has been amended several times since its inception, the original principles of its second article have not been changed. Secularism is a deep-seated concept in French history, and any monumental changes to the law, if they ever occur, will spur controversy and uprising among its devout supporters. 

Our Forever Wars

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is a timely novel of remarkable depth, despite its brevity. Its premise is simple: humanity discovers interstellar travel by speeding toward collapsed stars, seemingly covering light-years in moments, though actually with extreme time dilation. War soon breaks out with the Taurans, a strange alien race from near Aldebaran that supposedly attacked human ships.  

William Mandella, a physics student, is conscripted for an elite United Nations task force to fight the Taurans. After returning from what was for him a two-year expedition, he finds that 26 years have passed on Earth. Extensive class wars have led to the abolition of most private property, most are unemployed and living on government income, hunger has been eradicated through technological developments, and many nations encourage homosexuality to control population size and prevent more class conflict. Mandella and his occasional lover Marygay grow closer, sharing a feeling of alienation in a changed world, and eventually reenlist with the promise of a safe posting on Luna. When they quickly receive updated orders to return to combat, Mandella laments that he does not know which is worse: the feeling that this was bound to happen, or that he was returning to the only place he can call home.  

After another tour, Mandella is separated from Marygay, so with time dilation they will likely never see each other again. Mandella throws himself into his military service, the only life he knows now, but he is too different from those under his command, who are all homosexual, ethnically identical, and speak a new form of English. He does not hate these soldiers; in fact, he knows that he is the real “other,” so out of time that he cannot rightfully judge them. Mandella returns from his final tour to learn that his arrival marks the end of the “Forever War.” Mankind had become a fully cloned species that could communicate with the similarly collective Taurans, whose first utterance was a somber “Why?” The Taurans had not initiated the war. Generals had blamed the accidental disappearance of human ships on the aliens to create a war, in order to spur a weak economy. Catharsis does come for Mandella, however, as he eventually reunites with Marygay, who dramatically slowed her aging by continuously jumping between collapsed stars until he returned. But many soldiers do not enjoy such a happy ending to their struggle. 

Many view The Forever War as a foil to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, rejecting its glorification of war. But ultimately, it is an expression of Haldeman’s experience fighting in the Vietnam War, which shares obvious similarities with the novel’s conflict. Both wars started with spurious ideological justifications and economic greed. Both dragged on for many years with no real goal beyond attrition. Both ended with no meaningful change other than lives lost. Both destroyed the lives of many veterans while alienating them from normal society. These forever wars are most damaging because they persist without any conception of what victory looks like. An oft-parroted and more often mocked phrase from American generals in the late 1960s was that they could see a “light at the end of the tunnel,” satisfactory exit from Vietnam. But America did not fully exit the country until 1975. 

Much of the same can be said about American involvement in Afghanistan. After our twenty years of fighting and attempting to build a stable government and capable army, Kabul fell in less than ten days amid an embarrassingly haphazard American exit. And the persistent ineptitude of the Afghan army, from general incompetence to its notorious failure to address child sexual abuse, signifies both a lack of good management and a deep cultural divide that ridiculous amounts of time and resources could never bridge. Did anything substantively change over the course of this conflict, or was it another forever war? This seems to be a story that repeats itself. I was eleven months old when America entered Afghanistan; the conflict lasted almost until my graduation from college. I knew people who were born and passed away in that same period.  

An Afghanistan veteran once joked with me that “we fought to protect poppy fields, and we came home and became addicted to prescription opioids.” War always profoundly affects the individuals involved. Haldeman’s story is most valuable as a reflection on this tragic human element. There is usually no happy ending for those veterans who return home battered and broken. Society often rejects them, or has become unrecognizable to them. America should not allow wars to drag on forever due to moneyed interests or vapid ideology. And for the veterans, who have given their all for these protracted conflicts, the least we can do is be compassionate.  

Utilitarianism is too Cold and Calculating

In the second chapter of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill fails to defend his moral system against the suspicion that it is too cold and calculating. According to Mill, those who make this criticism charge utilitarians with being too impersonal in their moral evaluations, and too exacting in their principles. Holding this objection myself, I must clarify that the words “cold and calculating'' do not refer to a lack of sympathy in utilitarian applications. They rather explain a kind of diffused, managerial calculus where a colorful moral compass should be. Consequentialism does not rob its advocates of their sympathy; instead, it muddies the concept of intrinsic human value, and robs individuals of unified moral feeling altogether. 

Mill begins his defense against the “cold and calculating” objection by stating that it cannot be applied to utilitarianism’s treatment of action. He assumes that his system is offensive to critics only because it measures right and wrong against an objective principle, rather than a set of personal qualities. In light of his response, it seems necessary to say that I do not reject theories of universal justice when I criticize utilitarianism. Actions must be weighed against objective standards: an action is not inherently “right” if it is done by a benevolent man, or “wrong” if it is done by an abhorrent one. This is not a point of contention – to frame it as such would misrepresent the objection.  

The “cold and calculating” criticism deals with the problem of moral action quite directly when it indicts utilitarianism for ignoring the “qualities from which [...] actions emanate.” In other words, the fundamental flaw in utilitarianism lies not in its tendency to judge actions objectively, but in its inability to measure anything except for action. This is a serious issue for any theory of virtue, since moral standards necessarily apply to human agents, not to isolated events. For example, if a tornado inflicts an immense amount of pain on a community, it would not be called an immoral tornado. It would be absurd to pass moral judgments on events that bear no relation to a human will. Thus, to isolate an action from its human component is, by definition, to strip it of its moral qualities.  

Utilitarianism unfortunately violates actions in this way. According to Mill, “he who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of being paid for his trouble.” In other words, under utilitarianism, moral events must be judged as if they happened upon the world spontaneously. Thus, to deem an action “morally right” under this line of thought is no different than to call a natural disaster “morally wrong.” To give a practical example of this absurdity: if a man commits murder without meaning to, it seems intuitively true that his action is not morally equivalent to a premeditated murder. Utilitarianism does not make room for these simple considerations, so it renders itself incapable of identifying moral action altogether.  

Far from Mill’s accusation that the “cold and calculating” objection comes from a distaste for universal moral standards, it rather comes from an avid defense of them. Fundamentally, to exclude the human agent from any moral maxim is to make that maxim incompatible with morality. If Mill were to give the fairer version of the claim that his philosophy is cold and calculating, he would say not that it charges utilitarians with being hollow, but that it charges utilitarianism itself with being so. 

Whether or not their interpersonal conduct differs outwardly, utilitarians fundamentally operate with a moral compass that does not measure who they are, or how they treat others. In other words, strict utilitarians are not robbed of feeling, but of moral feeling. Moral value, in this system, is not granted to those with true inner virtue or beauty of character, but rather to those who are maximally effective in their utility (or whose behavior is the most productive). The vast and colorful human conscience is reduced to a calculus. Morality should not focus on calculating positive outcomes; it should cultivate human beings. What could be more cold and calculating than to ascribe virtue not to human agents, but to the circumstances their actions yield? In a system of this nature, it is hard to imagine that inner goodness will not be reduced to a mere accessory, and that respect for intrinsic human value will not be chilled or hollowed. 

Hamilton’s Suppression of the Rosary Club

On March 4th, the Burke Library hosted an event by student activists who launched  a smear campaign against the Alexander Hamilton Institute and its student publication, Enquiry. Also attacked in the pages of The Monitor, a Hamilton College-sponsored publication, was a recently formed student organization called the Rosary Club. According to The Monitor, some students believe that the Rosary Club operates with a “self-victimizing nature.” The truth is that it has been a constant uphill battle for the Rosary Club to operate at all. Its head, Devin Mendelson, sheds light on the reality of the situation.

“Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake.” Matthew 5:11

After praying what is known to Catholics as a “54-day novena” from last August to October, I felt inspired to begin a new club at Hamilton, one dedicated to Catholic prayer. I was given the green light to begin the Rosary Club in November. Father Peter El Hachem, the Catholic chaplain at the college, and Jeff McArn, the head of the chaplaincy, explained to me that the Rosary Club would be categorized as an offshoot of the Newman Council, the established Catholic organization on campus. While the Newman Council focuses on social events, the Rosary Club would be focused on prayer.

The Rosary Club received its own email address to send out campus-wide emails. I figured that although it wasn’t ideal that we would be unable to reserve rooms like every other club, we could at least send out emails and at least follow the teachings of the Church. In no way was it implied that being under, or an offshoot of, the Newman Council meant being controlled by its leadership. This supposed condition of the Rosary Club’s official recognition is retroactively being used as an excuse to crack down on our right to our own meaningful identity.

After just our second campus-wide email in December, which stated that the Rosary Club is 100 percent unapologetically pro-life, I received an email from Jeff McArn that said: “you should share all communications and events with the Newman exec board so there is agreement on how the Catholic community is being portrayed.”

Compromising Catholic values out of fear of what the world may think is not how Catholics are instructed to act. Jeff's email essentially translates to the Rosary Club being restricted from professing the teachings of the Faith at the behest of the Newman Council leaders, who apparently don't believe in certain Church teachings or are afraid to profess them since they are unpopular positions at Hamilton. (Keep in mind, the Church has taught the “sanctity of life” since the 1st century.)

For our final Sunday prayer session before spring break, the Rosary Club decided that the main purpose for that day’s Rosary would be “the restoration of authentic love between men and women.” We said so, in exactly those words, in a campus-wide email that included this quotation from Pope Francis: “We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.” With the quote from the Holy Father, we made clear that our intent was to pray for men and women to return to chastity and monogamy. Many students took issue with it for not including relationships that go against the Church’s teachings.

Shortly after that email, a hit piece appeared in The Monitor. The next day, I received a message from the director of student activities, Noelle Juliano. In it, she said “when [the Rosary Club] was approved by the organization review board it was approved so long as it was a branch of Newman Council. It’s come to my attention that Rosary may be acting as a separate group rather than a branch of a parent organization so Jeff McArn and I would like to meet with you to share what the expectations are since they may not have been clear originally.”

Before I had a chance to reply to her email, the following morning, she disabled the Rosary Club email account, justifying her action in a follow-up email: “Rosary is not a separate club” from the Newman Council, and “[f]uture events and communication will have to go through cooperation with Newman … Rosary was approved with the understanding that the group would work through Newman as its parent organization however Rosary has differentiated itself as a separate entity which was not approved by the club review board back in the fall. To that end, we had to freeze the email account and ask for a meeting to discuss how best to move forward.”

In other words, according to these messages, our club was approved with the expectation that its emails would have to be agreed to by the heads of the Newman Council. This is not accurate, and my response to Ms. Juliano’s first email, conceding that “[the expectations] may not have been clear originally,” is: Of course they hadn’t been made clear. Father Peter had me under the impression that it was standard operating procedure for any Catholic club at a college to be categorically placed under that school’s Newman Council. I was led to believe the decision to place us under the Newman Council was due to one of the Catholic Church’s organizing principles. It was only because I thought this subordinate relationship was a policy of the Church that I agreed to the club’s being placed under the Newman Council.

In essence, should the director of student activities and the Newman Council leaders have their way, Rosary Club emails that mention prayer intentions for certain authentic but often-unpopular Catholic beliefs, such as praying for the unborn victims or potential victims of abortion, would never see the light of day. This is a form of discrimination against our faith.

A week into spring break, I sent President Wippman a detailed message seeking help against such discrimination after the disabling of our email account. He replied by saying he would pass it along to the Dean of Students office. A week later, I received another email from Ms. Juliano:

“Though we don't typically give non-clubs email accounts, after a pause and reassessment we've decided to reinstate the rosary@hamilton.edu email address for the remainder of the semester barring no listserv violations. Since Rosary has differentiated itself from Newman Council we will need your group to reapply through the new organization process next fall if you wish to continue and receive the privileges of being a recognized organization.”

But if we were truly understood to be a “non-club,” we would not have been given an entire table at the most recent Clubs Fair. And according to the message, we must reapply as a new club next semester, after I have graduated, in order to be considered for formal recognition. Calling the Rosary Club a “non-club” sets up a potential pretext for giving my successor difficulty in getting it properly recognized next fall.

 I suspect that someone will again try to shut down the club next semester by rejecting it outright during the new organization application process, likely by saying the needs of Catholic students are sufficiently fulfilled by the Newman Council. If this happens, my successor will have to fight that battle on campus, although I will be happy to help as an alum.

No other club has to go through such hoops and hurdles simply to exist, and I think this is intolerable. I find it even more intolerable than the fact that the college and the Media Board apparently turned a blind eye and allowed a story in The Duel Observer to spread a lie about me on every table in Commons and McEwen: the hint that I am “desperate … to get a crumb of that Holiest of Grails … [and am] convert[ing] from Judaism solely to get engaged in [my] senior year of college so [I] can taste that ever-forbidden fruit.” The suggestion that I’m converting in order to experience the pleasures of the flesh with my fiancée upon marriage is false. I began my conversion process months before meeting her. The hint that I “only [attend] mass (virtually)” is based on the fact that I no longer attend Mass on campus. Instead, I go to a Traditional Latin Mass off-campus. The other claims made here aren’t worth addressing.

I can handle the petty emails and Instagram posts, tagging the Rosary Club account, boasting about how we inspired someone to donate to Planned Parenthood. I can likewise tolerate anonymous students signing up the Rosary Club’s email account to the mailing lists of Adam & Eve (a sex shop), loversstores.com, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the Communist Party USA (just to name a few). I will gladly deal with all of that, as my cross to bear.

Hamilton’s devout Catholics, however, shouldn’t have to put up with attacks against the Faith, such as the The Daily Bull’s sacrilege of photoshopping George W. Bush’s face onto a picture of Our Blessed Mother (and see the other side of that item here), or a blasphemous student publication headline: “Friday Five: Things That Are More Powerful than the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” Such things go against Hamilton’s anti-discrimination policies, but nonetheless seem to be permitted – like the personal attacks against me and the perverse objectification of my fiancée.

At the same time that these things are allowed or not addressed, the Rosary Club must fight a tedious bureaucratic battle simply to exist. Our last event before spring break, dedicated to praying for the restoration of authentic love between men and women, received backlash from the mob merely for not including relationships that the Church teaches are sinful and a certain view of the “gender spectrum.” This is part of what prompted the director of student activities to disable the Rosary Club email account a couple of days later (it was only recently reinstated). 

In essence, the Rosary Club account was shut down at least partly to appease the mob.

Meanwhile, students of traditional faith are subjected to not one or two, (three, four) but five emails pertaining to a “Bob the Drag Queen” event – just one of many examples of events offensive to their religious beliefs that pious students are subjected to by officially authorized campus emails. Not to mention the posters for such events across campus. If students of faith ever dared to speak out against any of it, we all know they would be faced with a “hate crime” investigation and probably be punished for it.

Why do we tolerate such a double standard?

It’s as if Hamilton, like so much else in America, has been taken over by anarcho-tyranny.

While “anarcho-tyranny” has generally been used to describe governmental policies, it can also be applied to the policies of a college. In Hamilton’s case, I think the term fits the administration’s unjust suppression of the Rosary Club while it simultaneously allows attacks against me and grotesque mockery of the Catholic faith.

Anarcho-tyranny is why some professors and students are comfortable blaspheming God in their everyday language, but students of faith would never dare to profess the teaching of our churches that homosexual acts are sinful. Anarcho-tyranny is why chastity is the only sexual identity student newspapers can make fun of without a hate crime investigation (see here and here). Anarcho-tyranny is why professors and students can make racist and hateful statements about white people but the slightest, most well-meaning critique of something in the black community could land you in serious trouble. Anarcho-tyranny is why a hockey team can advertise a game in Commons by defiling Sacred Scripture unscathed while the Rosary Club account gets disabled for nearly three weeks after the authentic love email. Anarcho-tyranny is why the Rosary Club, the only active club that goes against the worldly, sex-crazed cultural tide, can’t be on the same plane of existence as every other club on campus.

It is because of the anarcho-tyranny at Hamilton College, the tendency to selectively repress based on left-wing standards, that the Rosary Club, which had its own booth at the Clubs Fair, has been classified as a “non-club” by the director of student activities.