In the Victorian era, High Churchmen castigated Darwin as a materialist who would reduce men to mere monkeys, and earnest materialists enunciated a vision of scientific progress that, as it were, only incidentally drained the universe of purpose. Darwinian propaganda has been with us for 100 years, a mechanical explanation not only of the origins...
In The End of Science, John Horgan, a staff reporter for Scientific American, writes about his encounters with both scientists and philosophers of science and concludes that modern science is coming to an end. In every significant field of scientific research, from neuroscience to cosmology, theory has reached so great an impasse that new breakthroughs...
In this large and well-padded book, Carl Sagan promotes a vulgar scientism: the notion that science and its method provide the solutions to virtually all human problems and serve as the ultimate guide for human behavior. Sagan’s scientific method serves as a kind of “baloney detector” by which to detect the fraudulent, the self-serving, the...
It is reported that when one of Pythagoras’s followers revealed the Pythagorean brotherhood’s deepest secret, the discovery of irrational numbers, he was killed. The discovery of irrational numbers came about as a direct result of the Pythagorean theorem, for the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose legs are one inch equals the square root of...
Herbert Kohl: Growing Minds: On Becoming a Teacher; Harper &Row; New York. The author of The Open Class Room offers some progressive advice on the craft of teaching. Much of his argument is cast in the form of a personal memoir. To parents of school-age children, the history of Kohl’s teaching career will read more like a...
One of the best things about most of America’s past Presidential elections is that they have really decided so little. A remarkably centrist cultural and social consensus has dictated that, despite all of the vehement campaign rhetoric, both major parties have usually agreed on a wide range of fundamental issues. This national consensus has often...
Richard John Neuhaus: The Naked Piblic Square: Religion and Democracy; William B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, MI. The worst thing about the wonderful but secondary and nonsalvific blessings of Christianity is that once those who enjoy the divine bestowals have forgotten their source, these blessings are set up as objects of new and destructive forms of...
Morris Janowitz: The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Conscoiusness; University of Chicago Press; Chicago. In some ways nothing seems more un-American than military life. The hierarchic authority, the strict discipline, the regimentation of appearance and manner all appear antithetical to the modern American notion of individual rights. However, in Tbe Reconstruction of Patriotism Morris...
Ronald Blythe: Characters and Their Landscapes; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. Central though it is to any sound system of economics, the traditional notion of private property is wholly inadequate in the world of literature. As Henry David Thoreau once observed: I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of...
Scott Donaldson: Fool for Love, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Congdon & Weed; New York. Love, popular culture endlessly reminds us, makes the world go round. But since the cultural sphere now seems to be wobbling erratically in its orbit, a sensible observer might suspect that something is amiss in this rotary force. As citations in the...
Stephen E. Ambrose: Eisenhower, Volume One: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952; Simon & Schuster; New York. Great athletes, it is said, all are so good that they make their feats look easy. The same was true of Dwight David Eisenhower, first as a career soldier, then as Supreme Allied Commander, and finally as...
John M. Allegro: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth; Prometheus; Buffalo, N.Y. John M. Allegro has distinguished himself as an editor and commentator of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unfortunately, his erudition did not prevent him from writing a very foolish book. Allegro believes that the resemblance between the Scrolls and certain Christian practices...
Lately our national leaders seem to have taken it into their heads that their first obligation upon taking office is to get ready to write their memoirs once they leave it. We’ve had Nixon’s and Johnson’s, Kissinger’s massive volumes, and now Vance’s and Brzezinski’s. Jimmy Carter reportedly has a high-tech memoir in preparation, the entire...
It is a widespread belief that we can learn lessons from reading history. Of course, it is not often said what it is that we can learn, and historians are divided as to what the lessons of history really are. The opinion of most seems to be that we should read history in order to observe its ironies. That...
One of the best things about most of America’s past Presidential elections is that they have really decided so little. A remarkably centrist cultural and social consensus has dictated that, despite all of the vehement campaign rhetoric, both major parties have usually agreed on a wide range of fundamental issues. This national consensus has often...