Two journals (mostly available on line) have fall issues with interesting discussions. City Journal includes Kay Hymowitz’s discussion of women’s roles and a feminist view of 9/11, both discussed briefly below. Melanie Phillips’ “Britain’s Anti-Semitic Turn” is just plain depressing. She suggests reasons America been a fertile ground for neo-cons – Jewish and not – while England seems to be sending them over here. The November New Criterion hosts a series of discussions on the twentieth anniversary of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
Arts & Letters
Ranting on a Rant
A&L’s links tend toward the artsy or developed essay; over the weekend, however, it linked to a rant, Mark Morford‘s “American Kids, Dumber than Dirt”, subtitled “Warning: The Next Generation Might Just be the Biggest Pile of Idiots in U.S. History.”
It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It’s not the kids’ fault. They’re merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.
More on Photography, Meaning and Historiography
Jim Lewis has an interesting critique of Errol Morris, whose ruminations on ancient photographs I discussed in an earlier post.
Children of Light, Children of Darkness
The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:
“The biblical sense of history can make Niebhur seem like something other than a liberal. In the ’60’s, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era’s liberal reforms”
It wasn’t Niebuhr’s religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr’s writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman’s bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:
“The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness – ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil…Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics” ( Stockman,24).
I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.
My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.
ADDENDUM:
Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.
Cross-posted at Zenpundit
Photography, Meaning and Historiography
The Valley of the Shadow of Death by Roger Fenton (1855)
This is fascinating on several levels. First, there is a lot of discussion about the circumstances of the Sebastopol siege. Second, the photos themselves are impressive: those spent cannon balls littering the ground like rocks create, at least for me, a sense of tremendous danger. Finally, the guy who wrote this piece is a pretty good empirical historian and raises interesting questions about the circumstances of the photos and about historiography generally. Also, Susan Sontag comes out of it looking like a dope.