What’s Wrong with the World

For those interested, the Manhattan Institute held a symposium on Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, on the 20th anniversary of that book, a couple months ago. The video is here.

Conservatism has undoubtedly taken it on the nose lately, but it is instructive now and then to recall the calamitous successive failures of Liberalism, and reflect on how being a Liberal seems to mean never having to say you’re sorry. Consider, to take a salient example, the ruinous incompetence of the Liberals who handled American-Iranian relations on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. Some excerpts from Steven F. Hayward’s engaging study The Age of Reagan:

Since 1967, the U.S. Census Bureau has collected excellent comparative statistics on black vs. white income in the U.S.

Unfortunately, I just can't find anything even remotely comparable for the years *before* 1967 - i.e., for the years before the "civil rights movement" and "affirmative action."

Can anybody help me out, here? Do any such statistics exist?

What I'm trying to figure out is this: just exactly how well have said "civil rights movement" and said "affirmative action" worked out for African-Americans, on this (admittedly crude) measure?

I'm sure all of you are already sick of "Winter Wonderland."

Oddly, I'm not. At least not if I can listen to Bing Crosby sing it instead of somebody less talented. I notice this year, as every year now, one particular line of that song: "Later on we'll conspire, as we dream by the fire, to face unafraid the plans that we made walkin' in a winter wonderland."

Isn't that at least a little bit striking? Why do those plans require "facing unafraid"? Well, they're going to get married. (That's the bit about the snowman and Parson Brown.)

Yet another massacre of innocents in a public place — it’s become all too common in this country. The shock of it, that staggering horror we all felt back in the Nineties, has proven evanescent. There is now a routine to it: the television networks have their “Tragedy in Omaha” graphics ready within a half hour. A few witnesses are interviewed, the horror retold briefly; the police repeat some platitudes, perhaps a distant accomplice or collaborator is questioned and released; a few psychologists or criminal profilers utter their usual tedium — and then it’s back to coverage of the Iowa caucuses.

What are the chances that there will be a real effort of self-reflection following this latest mass murder/suicide in a public place? As David Kopel wrote (subscription only) on the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre (in a Weekly Standard article that made a vivid impression on me at the time): “the real lesson of Columbine is that very few people care enough about the horrible events of April 20, 1999, to try to prevent their recurrence.”

You can find it here.

(Full disclosure: Hunter, who is presently Director of Strategic Planning at Houston Baptist University, was my grad assistant at Baylor for two years [2003-05], and will be graduating with his PhD in religion, politics & society on December 15).

...A Marlene Dietrich quote which I found somewhat intriguing and provocative:

To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it's no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.

Update: for those so inclined, here is the Wikipedia entry for Dietrich.

“I’m embarrassed it took me so long,” writes Myron Magnet, “to grasp the phoniness of the charge that it’s ‘anti-immigration’ to oppose current U.S. immigration policy and the even worse ‘comprehensive reform’ bill, which thankfully failed.” This confession appears (subscription required) in the current number of The American Spectator, that fine magazine’s 40th anniversary issue.

He goes on to restate, with clarity, simplicity and deftly-marshaled evidential support, the enforcement-by-attrition approach to the immigration crisis in America. We need no “comprehensive” legislative reform. We need steady enforcement of current law, against both illegals and their abettors in business, government, and elsewhere. We need to be disabused of some stale clichés and sophistries, beginning with the one about the net benefit of mass immigration. Our immigration policy must rest unequivocally on American national interest.

Mr. Magnet is the former editor of the highly-respected New York-based City Journal. His arguments will not fall on deaf ears. This is, after all, the journal that was the intellectual muscle behind the astonishing transformation of New York City, which was one of the signal achievements of the last fifteen years in American political science, and which is the most solid pillar of accomplishment supporting the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani. For City Journal to throw in with the immigration skeptics is an indication of how far we’ve come from the heady days when Platitude was King.

Some commenters on the left have tried to spin Romney's "don't hate me because I'm Mormon" speech more or less like this: "oh, how horrid that he should even have to make such a speech! But those Republican primary voters are so bigoted against anybody who departs the least little bit from Christian orthodoxy that he had no choice. We Democrats, of course, would never even dream of rejecting somebody simply because of his religion!"

Meanwhile, back in the real world, The Huffington Post (!) Reports:

I'll apologize in advance for the length of the quotation, which is drawn from a favourite essay within a favourite book, Kolakowski's Modernity on Endless Trial, an anthology of selected essays written between 1973 and 1986. The essay, entitled, Politics and the Devil, commences with a brief discussion of the Christian doctrine of existence as a positive good, with evil, therefore, being wholly negative or privative in nature. The devil, then, cannot create either ex nihilo or de novo his own world-order, but must instead corrupt, debauch, deflect, or commandeer institutions or tendencies which have already legitimate purposes, moral and otherwise. Kolakowski's essay traces the moves and countermoves in the grand chess-match between God and the devil, wrought in the sphere of human freedom, as this impinges upon political affairs. We pick up his 'general history of their struggle' on the cusp of the transition to modernity:

One major task of the Enlightenment, among others, was to free politics from the fetters of religion. Since religion itself, by assuming so many political responsibilities and so much power, had become more and more contaminated with secular interests, more and more involved in military adventures, in diplomatic intrigues, and in amassing wealth for wealth's sake, the other part of the assignment was to purify Christianity itself and to reduce it to what was its proper business. This part was to be given to the Reform movement within the Church. Again, two sides of the same Roman coin.

The devil, as one should have expected, was operating relentlessly on both sides of the process, and quite successfully. Within in the Enlightenment proper, his idea was to convince people that it was not enough to liberate politics from religious control and to sever the State from the Church but that the progress of humanity consisted in forgetting its religious tradition altogether and, if necessary, doing it by violence. He gave the Enlightenment its anti-Christian shape and worked out, with the help of many fine and virtuous minds, the idea of humanism, which defined itself primarily by godlessness. Thereby it opened the door to the concept of politics as a sheer vying for power, power being a supreme good in itself; this went far beyond the Aristotelian tradition.

This was the easier and not very complicated half of the devil's job. Properly to wreck and to exploit the ideal of Christianity, which would have gotten rid of the secular pollution and returned it to its original purity, was a much harder task, but the devil proved to be up to the challenge.

Via Lawrence Auster, a report that Muslim militias in Basra, soon to undergo a complete transition back to local governance, are threatening Christian women who have hitherto declined to wear the veil or burqa.

Actually, the "not ready for civilization" part could apply equally well to America and Britain themselves, inasmuch they embarked upon an unjust war, which they sought to justify by appeal to multifarious fraudulent pretexts, ideological, evidentiary, and material, which war has had as its entirely foreseeable consequence the grievous and irreversible destruction of indigenous Christian communities. They do not "make a desert and call it peace"; no, they do worse: they unleash evil and laud themselves for having done good, and connive at gross injustice and wallow in the pretense of virtue.

Via my good friend Colin Miller, the following anti-Kant attack advertisement.

I'll note, for the time being, that Kant gets sublimity precisely backwards; the sublime does not awe us by awakening us to our rational mastery of contingent being, or some such thing, but overawes us, stupefying our faculties and pointing to what lies beyond phenomenal experience. And "rational mastery" is still a part of phenomenal experience. And no, I've no interest in re-reading the Third Critique, either.

So, put me down for the Other Guy, or, better yet, None of the Above. But the Other Guy, at least, is a much more enthralling read.

I cannot hope to approach the aptness of Srdja Trifkovic's own title, Kosovo as a Symbol of Anti-Postmodernism, and so I have not tried. Nevertheless, the essay is a masterful summation of the significance this little piece of Balkan territory holds in the not-so-playful scheme of signifiers regnant in the West. Selected excerpts follow.

Blissfully unaware of the cultural tectonic shift that has taken place in “the West,” many Serbian political leaders, analysts and institutions in their contacts with the Western elite class keep invoking four sets of arguments in support of their position that Kosovo ought to remain part of Serbia:
1. Historical: Kosovo was the heartland of the Serbian medieval state;
2. Cultural: in Kosovo there are many priceless monuments of Serbian art and architecture that define Serbia’s contribution to the common European heritage;
3. Spiritual: Kosovo is “Serbia’s Jerusalem”;
4. Civilizational: Kosovo should not fall to the insurgent jihad.

Not that American politicians are likely to take notice - to do so would be to indulge in nativism, or worse - notwithstanding the present saliency of the illegal immigration question. For, you must understand, it is one thing to take cognizance of the deleterious effects of illegal immigration - though even this is fraught with innumerable pitfalls of wrongthought - and quite another to notice that even legal immigration may alter the political and culture landscape in ways undesirable to the natives. Why, nations are arbitary constructs, mere temporary congealments of transient market relations, or invidious attempts to exclude and oppress The Other. What right have the 'natives' -a meaningless term, anyway - to keep something - which is nothing, really - to themselves? The audacity!

Not that American politicians are likely to notice then, that demographic change married to ethnic politicking has resulted in the ouster of John Howard, former Australian Prime Minister and Friend of Bush. After all, the dominant liberal world-picture cultivates habits of blindness, reality, including correlations between ethnicity and culture, or ethnicity and political proclivities, being a blasphemy against the solemn dignity of the Idea.

We’re coming up on two full years of wrestling with the immigration question in a highly public way. The striking fact is this: catastrophe has been averted. We have, admittedly, made precious few positive steps toward improvement; but fewer still have been the advances of that plutocracy which conspires to subjugate the Republic on this issue. A stubborn, noble resistance endures. I find this remarkable.

The weight of elite opinion — business, government, media, intelligentsia, ecclesiastic — is quite overwhelming. In virtually every field of affairs, the elite wants “comprehensive” reform and will not compromise toward an incremental policy of enforcement by attrition. Its failure bespeaks the lasting vitality of American democracy

For those of you who think we, or at least I, never have a good word to say about Muslims, herewith a getting-close-to-Christmas story. (HT TROP)

Apparently a bunch of young men were aboard a New York subway and were randomly yelling "Merry Christmas." (This is a conjecture, but as it says it was "late," I think we may infer that they'd imbibed liquid refreshment and were becoming not only boisterous but also belligerent.) Also on the train were a group of young Jewish girls and guys, who began calling back "Happy Hannukah" to them.

What happened next is a bit unclear (to me, anyway), but evidently the Christmas-shouting thugs became angry and began behaving threateningly to at least one of the Jewish girls. Whereupon a bystander, a 5' 7", 140 lb. Muslim Bangladeshi waiter named Hassan Askari, pushed one of the young Cossacks away from the Jewish girl (why didn't her escort do this first?), and got himself a couple of black eyes and a swollen face for his pains.

There's no word here on what happened to the thugs, whether they ended up in custody, whether they will be charged, or exactly how the whole thing ended without more serious injuries. We learn only that one of the young Jewish men pulled the emergency cord and thus alerted the powers that be to trouble on the train, which presumably had something to do with the breakup of the whole thing.

Confoundment to those who take the name of Our Lord and the feast of His birth in vain. And honor where it's due. To Hassan Askari: May he someday come to know Jesus Christ and learn the true meaning of "Merry Christmas."

HT to Lydia


Add to My Profile | More Videos

Director of Biola's Torrey Honors Institute, John Mark Reynolds, offers a wonderful assessment of J. P. Moreland's 2007 ETS paper and its critics, about which I have blogged here, here, and here. Under the title, "Moreland’s Modest Proposal Stirs Up An Immodest Response," Reynolds published his comments on the blog to which he and Moreland contribute, The Scriptorium Daily. You can read Reynolds' thoughtful entry here.

If one spends any amount of time, even a few torturous, agonizing, ascetical-works-of-purgation moments reveling in the 'insights' delivered by conservative talk radio, one will encounter a certain meme which, roughly, reduces to the idea that any policy at variance with the policy preferences of the economic wing of the Republican party - the supply-siders, the free-traders, and Wall-Street bagmen - is tantamount to socialism. Nay, may be socialism itself, cloaked as obscurantist populism, and will assuredly set us off on the Broad Way of the Road to Serfdom. For example, some possibly well-intended pol may proffer, as a means of encouraging the nation to lessen its increasingly-ruinous path-dependence upon foreign sources of energy, some tax, or tax-credit, intended to subsidize research in potential alternatives, and the talk-radio personalities and members of the conservative punditocracy will often deride the proposal as utterly illiterate, Big Government on the march, running roughshod over 'consumer preferences', and portending a buckboard ride down the road to serfdom. Such proposals, however, may or may not be wise, depending upon the details, the expected implementation, and the economic rationales and ramifications; nevertheless, where such proposals are of dubious merit, the reasons are particular and empirical, and do not reduce to the assertion that they are truck stops on Hayek's road.

Via Lawrence Auster and a correspondent, news that Charles Johnson of LGF has, more or less, slipped the tether of reality:

I'm sure you're bored rigid by now over the antics at LGF and its recalibration to the left but I'm concerned with the way LGF is targeting major figures in the anti-jihad movement: Fjordman, the Gates of Vienna blogsite, Bat Ye'or (whose Eurabia theory has been trashed), Diana West, and, I believe, soon to be, Robert Spencer. I've heard that Spencer and Johnson are or used to be friends.

Spencer is crucial to the anti-jihad movement and has been instrumental in making Islam's doctrines widely known on the Internet. In his precise, unemotional and scholarly fashion, he is far more of a responsible symbol than LGF could ever hope to be.

Cultural particularity is the stumbling block of this unfortunate age of human history, upon which the West itself, in thralldom to various malign ideologies and delusions, now dashes itself.

It was inevitable that, with the vaulting of Mike Huckabee into the top tier of GOP presidential contenders, the rhetorical knives would be drawn. Huckabee was never one of the anointed candidates of the GOP establishment, and espouses a version of the now-discredited "Compassionate Conservatism" that has proven so disastrous under Bush; beyond that, there are the facts that several of his announced policy positions alienate key factions within the GOP establishment, that he was rather liberal and imprudent in granting clemency to ne'er-do-wells, and that he demonized - prior to his recent 'conversion' to the cause of immigration reform - advocates of immigration enforcement as hard-hearted bigots acting contrary to the highest ethical dogmas of Christianity.

There is more to the matter, though, than this. There is also the GOP's very own dialect of class warfare.

Mr. J. H. Kunstler, of the Peak Oil theory fame, reviewed Bob Dylan’s first volume of memoirs some time ago. Dylan fans (of whom I doubt this website has in abundance) will find in it some insight and interest, though I only link to it reluctantly — not least because of Kunstler’s penchant for profanity. If you don’t know or like Dylan, or are repelled by the deliberate if rare use of oaths or vulgarity in critical writing, the essay will probably just fatigue you: so I’ll offer just a couple points for your notice.

Recent developments in the Republican presidential campaign have afforded the establishment right the opportunity to articulate its vision of order within the conservative movement, occasioning the curious spectacle of a movement which has played the people-against-the-elites card for generations suddenly lauding expertise, credentials, and the cultivated minority. There is, of course, a place for such things in any conservatism worthy of the name; the crucial things are that the elites and their substantive traditions be identified correctly, and that corrupt, false, and degraded pretenders to authority be exposed. One does not read Babbit, Weaver, or Kirk and develop a leveling sensibility; neither, though, does one acquire a sense that the characteristic modern forms of authority, being invested in value-neutral technique, are legitimate.

National Review, however, has recently telegraphed that, perhaps, that most venerable of traditional authorities is no longer quite so welcome as it once was.

I have been stricken speechless by the following textbook excerpt concerning the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq:

This is directly out of my 6th grade sister's history book. (And she has a test over it tomorrow.) "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, terrorism became a major threat to world peace. In 2003, U.S. military forces invaded Iraq. They were sent to prevent Iraq from using chemical and biological weapons. ... The United States has protected innocent civilians or helped bring peace to a war-torn region."

People, Places and Change: An Introduction to World Studies
Holt, Rinehart and Winston
page 103 (From Ryan Hainlen, posted by Karen DeCoster over at
Lew Rockwell's
site.

Unbelievable.

Srdja Trifkovic has posted another excellent commentary on the most recent American machinations towards the establishment of an independent Kosovo, another jihadist narco-state lying in the soft underbelly of Europe. Concerning the possible Serbian response to an American-supported unilateral declaration of independence - a blockade, suspension of diplomatic relations with the conspiring nations, and a possible forcible partition of the Serbian enclaves, with a retention of sovereign claims over the remainder - Trifkovic writes:

Serbia’s response will have a limited impact on the countries outside the region, but that will not be the end of the story. Russia, China and India, and dozens of Asian and African countries with secessionist problems—including South Africa and the most populous predominantly Muslim country, Indonesia—will deem the move illegal and invalid. The theory that outside powers can award part of a state’s sovereign territory to a violent ethnic or religious minority, only if that minority is able to provoke a violent government response and secure a “humanitarian” intervention from abroad, would put in question the borders of at least two-dozen states.