"Restore(s) a little sanity into current political debate" - Kenneth Minogue, TLS "Projects a more expansive and optimistic future for Americans than (the analysis of) Huntington" - James R. Kurth, National Interest "One of (the) most important books I have read in recent years" - Lexington Green
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As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it. Havel
At 75, having lived a remarkably full and generous life, Vaclav Havel has died. (Other comments today.)
Instapundit links to Welch’s 2003 profile which ironically begins by discussing Havel’s sense of the moral rot of dishonesty within communism by referring to Orwell and Hitchens.
The richness of his vision comes through in one of the more superficial but certainly evocative sites, where this man of action demonstrates the power of the epigrammatic as well. But, while writing well, he also acted well: words of commitment amd acts of commitment.
Our government department always celebrates Constitution Day and today (a bit late) they brought back one of their favorites, H. W. Brands. His talk was aimed at our students; he walked a quite straight line describing constitutional interpretations. I felt that noting the founders knew nothing of airplanes might be interesting, but is a straw man. Still, he kept his poise on that tightrope. He could aim a little higher, it seems to me, but no one can fault his passion and enthusiasm.
And I’m grateful, finding pleasure in “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Constitution” which noted that 1776 was the date of both “manifestos” – the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations. Each semester I yoke these (with religion and speech and the press) as part of the “open marketplace” with its confidence in the eventual and incremental wisdom of our nation. (Perhaps someone who puts on his biography that he spent some time traveling in the West selling cutlery is likely to see this juxtaposition in a way few others nominated for Pulitzers do.) Read the rest of this entry »
An entertaining aspect of Perry’s entry has been commentary explaining Aggies (even in Texas, one says, Aggies are considered hicks;yuh think). As the t-sips describe the yell leaders and Aggies boast of National Merit scholars, true outsiders may not realize the Corps was compulsory for much of its first century. Today Perry was ably (or at least energetically) commended by a t-sipper (Plan 2) and poliltical rival. Perry’s a mensch Kinky Friedman concludes. Friedman’s style is discursive; he never edits a good one-liner. And he acknowledges that at this point he’d choose Charlie Sheen over Obama. Still the piece is affectionate and, in the end, forceful: “A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.” (With Kinky irony & sentiment are often paired.)
Mark Steyn, too, is a nail that hasn’t been hammered down – he, too, argues “that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats.” (It’s about an hour.) He, too, sometimes sacrifices coherence for humor. But, in the end, his arguments for human rights and self-reliance, the core of After America, have a steady aim. His historical context is not the southwest but northeast; he chose the granite state and citizenship. And Steyn reminds us why someone – someone who thinks and someone who is a nail too stubborn to be hammered down – would choose what we too long took for granted.
We might oppose that to the stimulus; Fitzgerald summed up the end of that old bubble in “Babylon Revisited”: “the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word dissipate – to dissipate into thin air; to make something of nothing.” But wasn’t the desire, always, of this politics to control others, not to create nor to make. And how many Middle Eastern palaces are likely to fall into ruin by the end of the next century. The self-indulgent life is often described as dissipated – but how much worse a dissipated culture.
Roy Lofquist’s point that space meant clans didn’t bump against each other may well be first cause of respect for others here; the building of the west by both north and south surely was helpful in healing those raw mid-nineteenth century wounds. But in the end, we were founded in the mercantile era and capitalism – which turns us to look at what we can do to please and entice another. Frances Hutcheson would argue as my more religious friends do – we serve ourselves by serving others. That felicity is enlarging. Our natural desire to extend our self – to create, to leave a mark – can come from good works and procreation and art. But it can also come from creating a business, creating a product. Ford’s desire to make a product all could buy was capitalist, creative, and productive. Building a bigger oven and planting more wheat is better than fighting over the pieces of one pie.
Looking at the bridges from the Puritans to the American Enlightenment, I came upon this (probably read long ago by other Chicagoboyz). Internalizing (as much as universalizing) means a country of multiple religious beliefs can be tolerant without its citizens feeling that their souls are risked if this is the assumption. And proselytizing to save others’ souls will also be ones of arguments, examples, words rather than of intolerance. Of course, implicitly a religion with an external locus is less likely to be tolerant – nor feel toleration is good.
In the second place. The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.
Women in the Republic of Virtue -
In revolutions, women tale up the flag and even the sceptre: every arm and voice is needed. So among the revolutionaries were the voices of women like Mercy Otis Warren. During the following years, women’s roles in the home as educators and molders was emphasized: a “republic of virtue” required both a knowledgeable and a moral public. Perhaps the most telling invasions of twentieth century tyrants were private – as the private became the public. That insertion appalls us, as the communist regime “becomes” family and church; the patriarch’s voice, visage enters the public’s mind, casting a weighty shadow. We think of the one-child rule of China, but the valuation was little different in the Communist underground in the west, encouraging promiscuity and devaluing marriage, denigrating child-bearing and emphasizing abortion. Read the rest of this entry »
I’d like to note some minor irritations. Few lead as voyeuristic a life as I do, often using pop culture as a gauge to my reality. I know that betokens superficiality. Well, so be it. I’ve wasted much life in front of television sets and reading murder mysteries. And Humphrey Bogart’s image moved through that life.
So I followed ALDaily’s link to an LRBreview of Stefan Kanfer’s Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart. Apparently, for Jenny Diski, as for many of us, Humphrey Bogart was bigger than life. He died before I became a teen, but his old movies reran constantly on fifties’ television; when I started college, French directors, as Diski notes, led us back to him. I watched many yet again at Chicago’s Clark in the late sixties. Bogart merged with the heroes of hard boiled thrillers and then Camus as we started to take our intellectual lives more seriously.
Some definitions of the “American Dream” don’t comport with human nature but then fault America for not achieving a fantasy no one (no sane man would have) ever posited. But the essential American dream is of a society freely joined, each respectful of others but autonomous and fulfilled.
That society tests the workability of our theories of the good life. We, if often unconsciously, value natural law: the primacy of moral fulfillment of our nature. The thinkers who defined our culture and then our government often spoke of the great irony of power through submission, becoming our best selves by acknowledging larger powers. That is most efficient not when we are clapped in a theoretical or real prison, but by enlarging horizons and testing ideas – we learn humility through perspective & experience, we learn what works. The Puritans, not surprisingly, saw this in religious terms. Winthrop argues the test of their religious love for one another and their God: could they demonstrate a community bound by the ligaments of that love succeeds? If so, others might be persuaded; if they failed, certainly others would not choose their path.
Does it work? A century later, this guided Franklin’s experiments with bifocals and a government constrained by the Constitution. What works may be humbling – Lysenko was surely humbled when he found his ideas replaced. But it is also bracing.
The Puritans begin each semester. Their beliefs and modes of thought foreshadow much that comes after. Their emphasis upon the word – understood, translated, interpreted – leads to reasoned argument; they do personal interpretation and respect biblical authority, they do introspection and encourage humility. These naturally lead to experimentation, scientific skepticism. How a Puritan – Cotton Mather – and a figure now seen as personifying the scientific method and American Enlightenment – Benjamin Franklin – reacted to the 1721 small pox epidemic in Boston is the subject of the short, quite readable The Pox and the Covenant by Tony Williams. The controversy over inoculation split the town, undercut the old traditions, and show us the universals that moved them and now move us. Reason, pride, passion, feeling for our fellows entered into a controvrsy which also challenges our assumptions, our sense of who Cotton Mather was and who Benjamin Franklin was.
The battle set authorities – scientific and religious – against one another. William Douglass, the most credentialed Boston doctor, countered Boylston, one of the most innovative of the American-trained practitioners. More important to our understanding of the period, perhaps, and to my lit class, it also set Cotton Mather (with his father Increase), the leading Puritan ministers, scholars and authorities of their day, against the Franklin brothers. The brilliant Benjamin was a mere apprentice but already the witty author of the Dogood letters. His brother, James, found that encouraging and exacerbating the controversy increased the popularity of the New England Courant, their new paper: what the Iran hostage crisis was for ABC’s nightly report, this battle was for the Frankllins.
The Tea Parties were not violent. Mobs didn’t go after bankers with pitchforks. Instead of sending American Muslims off to interment camps, we tred so softly that 13 people lay dead at Fort Hood. When white slavery appeared encouraged at Acorn and Planned Parenthood, we did not shut our eyes. We wanted both closed down. We recognized the clear lack of justice in the principle of public sector unions; we cited human nature & the inevitable bloat. We saw as farce politicians/bureaucrats negotiating with unions to set deals that other parties – mainly the taxpayers – would have to pay. We understand the importance of the rule of law, of restraining our desire for money & power & sex.
Rick Perry is someone I have long underestimated; his policies have kept us in relatively safe economic order despite the effect of national energy policies on a state that makes much from oil and despite the fact that some of the highest rates of illegal immigration and drug wars are on our borders. Instapundit links his policy on education. Reining in academic bureacracies, perqs and salaries is not anti-intellectual. It is egalitarian. Expecting state colleges to prove the value of the credentials they “sell” is the responsibility of government regulation. Read the rest of this entry »
This began as a comment and, given my extremely limited (nonexistent) expertise, it is rambling observations and questions – and if Michael & Madhu say I’ve got it wrong, well, I probably do.
Mental hospitals dotted the landscape in the 50′s and 60′s. That was another time: some of us got through college pulling night shifts at them. Psychiatric counseling was a rite of passage among the artsy. (Note Girl Interrupted and Emily Fox Gordon’s Mockingbird Years. ) Gordon treats that particular perspective with irony. But such approaches were not always helpful and certainly those public wards filled with the less affluent were sad and lifeless. Read the rest of this entry »
In the last 20 years, conservative ideas, including the value of all work, which binds us to each other through the strange beauty of commerce and voluntary exchange, have done more to turn around American cities than four decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare entitlements, social programs, and public housing ever did. More than 10,000 minority males are alive in New York City today who would have been dead, had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early 1990s level. A policy triumph doesn’t get any more concrete than that.
My husband and I both feel ill at ease in the churches we have been attending. His has become more evangelical, more charismatic. That is the wave of the present and it is likely to evoke in congregants a more passionate belief. But it is not his way. Even less is it mine. Mine is bloodless in its Christianity, dismissive of the church’s role in shaping values we hold dear. And politicized. My husband and I like and respect the people in the congregations. And we have a loyalty – his people were around in the Battle of White Mountain and my people arrived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century from Wales and Scotland, Protestants to the core. He’s related by blood to many in his small congregation; I’m related in spirit – the church is like the church of my youth. Read the rest of this entry »
The “pursuit of happiness” isn’t mindless partying – at which my students are experts – but a life of productivity and energy, of fulfilling the potentials of the talents with which each is entrusted, as the Biblical parable goes. Does anyone think that the young man of the post below is fulfilling his potential? This is the right our society should give – to become not merely to be. Read the rest of this entry »
I set my students a minor task in rhetoric & comp: definition, narrated example. The terms were gendercide, feminization of American culture, and democide. When I defined them in a general way, my students posited reasons men drop out. One girl said they were lazy; another argued they were stupid. I looked at the boys; no argument there. What’s happening, I thought. Then, as they discussed organizational approaches, one said his topic was gendercide in Bosnia. I was surprised – most were looking at India and China.
The paper proved problematic. The most obvious flaw was the length of an interview with a woman in a refugee camp – the block quote took up most of his paper. A woman was interviewed who described the destruction of her village: the boys and men separated from women and children. Then, the women heard gunfire. The young boys came running, telling them “it was finished.” The women were ordered off to Albania. Spotty gunfire continued. The women were threatened; they started on their trek. The incident, of course, was representative not only of tragedies of that place and time, but eternal ones in war zones. At the end of America’s first war, King Philip was executed, his children and wife sold into slavery. But we don’t need much historical knowledge to recognize the pattern.
My student’s belief was that this described a society that wanted to rid itself of women and children so it could have a stronger, more educated workforce. Indeed, he observes “in the past, women were emotionally murdered because of the male dominant workforce.” In a flourish at the conclusion, he says we are learning women are capable and perhaps one will become president, perhaps the best president we’ve had. Transitions were less his strong suit than mine – and mine are often tenuous. And, well, sure. A woman and mother of three daughters doesn’t think we belong at the back of the bus – nor under a veil. Read the rest of this entry »
The mishandled and snarky firing of Juan Williams has been widely commented upon & here I do little but sum up. Companies may dismiss as they wish – I hesitated and was quite often wrong in doing so. But I was not supported by tax money; my complaints were of what someone had done, not what was thought. While I don’t intend to more than mention it in class, I hope our assignments will lead my students to a useful historical context. For anyone who doesn’t know of the incident or needs refreshing, 3 Youtubes: Juan Williams’ words, his response and Vivian Schiller’s definition of journalistic ethics & integrity.
Let’s review the controversy.
What Williams said many (most) feel. Of course, he wished he didn’t feel it. But the response was prompted by experience: not only was 9/11 done in the name of a religion, but so were a series of often incompetent but sometimes successful (think Fort Hood) efforts by Soldiers of Islam. In court and openly, perpetrators claim connections between these scattered events – the first shots in a coming religious war. To ignore that is to shut our eyes and ears. Only a society asleep, unconscious, dead – or purely ideological – could so discount experience. An unthinking mob may be a tool some desire, but this is not a virtuous desire. The motives behind such desires are perhaps most beautifully exemplified by Frederick Douglass, who counters our initial state (one the plantation owners desire to be life-long) with one of virility and manliness, characterized by restlessness, curiosity, independence, autonomy. Another 19th century writer, Thoreau, talks about the pleasure of a “fact.” When facts are taboo, so is thought.
I’m often critical of the big school – but where it is good, it is damn good. I always liked to hire e.t.s because they were generally a polite, hard working and practical lot. That was Hall’s major. But getting a copy job out on time isn’t the same as saving 33 miners; their “can do” does the little and it does the big. Here’s the story from a local perspective: Aggie Recalls. (Fox Interview, Old Ags)
First paragraph: Gregory Hall fielded media interviews Wednesday, including one with CNN. He took a congratulatory call from Texas Gov. Rick Perry that began with “Howdy, Ag!” And he still had time for a three-hour class to help with his scheduled ordainment as a Catholic deacon in February.
These guys are spread around the world and a major reason American oil rigs and refineries are remarkably safe – remarkable to all but those who have no sense of how huge such a task is. And this is American pragmatism & idealism, blended at its best. It is the “west” Catton talks about when he contrasts Lee and Grant – seeing each as representative of a region’s best. And all the frontiers didn’t close, Turner aside, in 1890 – there’s the land, sea, and air.
. Apparently, for Jenny Diski, as for many of us, Humphrey Bogart was bigger than life. He died before I became a teen, but his old movies reran constantly on fifties’ television; when I started college, French directors, as Diski notes, led us back to him. I watched many yet again at Chicago’s Clark in the late sixties. Bogart merged with the heroes of hard boiled thrillers and then Camus as we started to take our intellectual lives more seriously.
by Tony Williams. The controversy over inoculation split the town, undercut the old traditions, and show us the universals that moved them and now move us. Reason, pride, passion, feeling for our fellows entered into a controvrsy which also challenges our assumptions, our sense of who Cotton Mather was and who Benjamin Franklin was. 