“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” —Edmund Burke There is a photograph of Rebecca West taken shortly before her death: she sits in a throne-like armchair looking slightly off camera. One of her hands rests on the carved handle, the other is in her lap. Her...
Hatred of the past ill becomes a historian. Yet it is hard not to detect this disfiguring animus—paired with an overweening love of contemporaneity—in the works of many modern historians of family life. In recent decades, men such as Philippe Aries, Edward Shorter, and Lloyd DeMause have alleged—on the basis of scanty evidence—that in premodern...
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.” —Mazzini My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could...
“Not till the fire is dying in the grate / Look we for any kinship with the stars.” —Meredith The post-World War I shattered visions of Pound and Eliot are perhaps fundamentally less different from the incoherencies of Kerouac and Corso, the randomly referential allegory of Ashbery, or the associative anarchy of Bly and Merwin...
Linda Hasselstrom is a friend of mine, although we don’t write often or know each other well. I visited her South Dakota ranch, between the Black HOls and the Badlands, only once, six years ago, at which time I had the unwitting bad manners to ask her how much land she owned. It was an...
If Eleanor Roosevelt was the self-appointed godmother of post-New Deal liberalism, then Freda Kirchwey was its unelected recording (and traveling) secretary. Each woman understood her role and memorized her lines before assuming her part in her long and stormy run on the political stage. In preparation for her grand entrance each woman took a good...
“A system-grinder hates the truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson During the 25 years of its existence, contemporary feminism has received a measure of gentle chiding for its excesses. Not even the most indulgent eye can completely overtook feminist comparisons of marriage to prostitution, childbirth to defecation, or the use of the pronoun “he” to Jim Crow....
In writing of sensual pleasures, Thomas Hobbes observed that “the greatest” is “that by which we are invited to give continuance to our species, and the next by which a man is invited to meat, for the preservation of his individual person.” From more than one perspective, Hobbes had his priorities straight. Parents, on more...
In the beginning was the Word. Not verbum, the written word, thought Erasmus, but sermo, the spoken word. Whatever its validity for understanding St. John’s Gospel, literature that matters seems to split along the lines of that dichotomy. There are exciting and important books that dance on the page, wheeling and turning at the command...
“Hey, if you hit the ball right, it goes. What can I tell you.” —Lenny Dykstra, author and New York Mets outfielder Six years ago my husband added action to an idea and started his own business. Today his company has 130 employees and $13 million in sales. At 13 million, we are not exactly...
It was one of those Saturday nights that spills over into Sunday morning. Invited into the home of a main-line Protestant couple in split-level northern New Jersey, the 40ish group was made up of Jews and Roman Catholics from the neighborhood and of visiting Southern Baptists from Texas. After enjoying much conversation and suffering the...
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.” —Somerset Maugham It is just possible that Tom Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, may be more important for extraliterary reasons than for purely literary ones. Of course, there are no purely literary reasons for anything, especially in the form of fiction, perhaps...
One of the more curious features of our time is the inordinate attention given by the Reagan administration and the American media to Libya and its mercurial dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Sporadic outbursts in Washington, echoed in the press, have served to elevate the unstable ruler of a weak. Third World police state to almost superhuman...
Any reader familiar with Martin Amis’ novels—especially his most recent, Money: A Suicide Note (1984)—will not be surprised by the relentlessly contemptuous tone of The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, a collection of his essays and articles on America and Americans. While Amis confesses at the outset that he “feel[s] fractionally American” (his...
“The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.” —O.W. Holmes Jr. In July 1865 John R. Dennett, a Massachusetts journalist and recent graduate of Harvard College, arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, the first stop on an eight-month journey that would...
“In the end physics will replace ethics just as metaphysics displaced theology. The modern statistical view of ethics contributes toward that.” —Soren Kierkegaard When the historical sequence of men, of societies, of time and thought failed Henry Adams—sequences that might have yielded him some meaning about life—he remarked in The Education that he found himself...
Those of us who have helped to found conservative campus journals envy The American Spectator. Born in 1967 into modest circumstances—as upstart samizdat published out of a farmhouse by four Indiana University students—it has gone on to achieve nationwide distribution, a distinguished list of subscribers, and a 500-page anniversary collection of its work from a...
The Irish have a word—as they are supposed to—for this sort of book: blather. The author could be described as one of those fellows who “does go on,” to the point of being, eventually, barred from the pub for boring everyone to tears. The Gun in Politics bears the subtitle “An Analysis of Irish Political...
It is a common fact of our century—appreciated most by George Orwell—that men who lust after power will distort words to gain their own ends. In 1933, a significant distortion took place. A group of men, John Dewey among them, drafted and published a now famous document, the Humanist Manifesto I, in which they declared...
The old saw tells us that all things come to those who wait. And what a joy it is to find Andrew Lytle, in his vigorous 80’s, receiving his just due, however late. The Richard Weaver Award by The Ingersoll Foundation, a generous grant by the Lyndhurst Foundation for his contribution to his Southern culture,...
“By their fruits, so shall ye know them.” —Jesus of Nazareth The year 1986 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Mies, the man who, under the name of Mies van der Rohe, did the most to shape modern American architecture. Of the numerous books that marked Fred Butzen is a technical writer...
“Amazed at the moment’s peak, flesh became word—and the word fell.” —Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows Upon a confirmed gringo like me, contemporary Spanish language poetry makes much the same impression as contemporary Spanish or Latin American concert music. Broad prairies of cadenza enclose a garden patch of melodic theme, an orotund thunder of...
“In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration. . . . Only then can a shock from the outside put an end to the whole.” —Burkhardt Discussion of treason has become almost impossible without quoting Sir John Harington’s famous couplet, “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? / For if it...
“He that fails in his endeavors after wealth and power will not long retain either honesty or courage.” Not all change is progress. This simple statement is one of the dividing lines between right and left. An element of common sense to the conservative, it is denounced as timidity or a lame defense of vested...
In that bloated morass called American higher education, only a few institutions remain that are committed to the classical virtues and to learning as an induction into Western civilization. Hillsdale College is counted among that number. Credit for holding that course goes to George Roche, who as the institution’s president has labored to defend the...
“He can be compelled who does not know how to die.” —Seneca “That’s IT. I’ve HAD it with bourgeois-liberal guilt!” In disgust, my friend slammed Lillian Rubin’s new book back across the table at me. We had been reading a hospital scene (one of many) from Quiet Rage, Rubin’s account of the Bernhard Goetz case:...
“Of all the frauds that ever have been perpetrated on our generation, this ‘psychography’ is the worst,” wrote Douglas Southall Freeman a few weeks before his death, adding, “How dare a man say what another man is thinking when he may not know what he himself is thinking!” This criticism is what the distinguished biographer...
“And somewhere, waiting for its birth, / The shaft is in the stone.” —Henry Timrod Searching for the “Southern quality” once identified by Marshall McLuhan can be an absorbing and rewarding quest. After all, the South is a vast and varied region, one that has, as things go in this country, a lot of history...
Cows sacred, evil, and venal are shot by Vladimir Voinovich in this satiric look at the Soviet Union that reads like a combination “Ivan in Wonderland” and Zamiatin’s WE. The hero of Moscow 2042, like Voinovich, is a Soviet émigré writer living in West Germany. Our protagonist, Vitaly Kartsev, takes a 30-day trip by airplane...
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” —Thomas Jefferson With the exception of the driven and depressed Lincoln, no major figure in American history is, in the final analysis, more enigmatic than Jefferson. Without any exception, none is more complex. There is more to the enigma and complexity than a...
Horace Greeley may have had it right for his 19th-century compatriots, but the proper direction for the ambitious voyagers of this century has too often been eastward. Just ask New Mexico’s own Samuel Andrew Donaldson. No one asked her, but Chloe Hampson Donaldson thinks she knows why her son strayed from the straight and narrow...
“Look how wide also the east is from the west: so far hath he set our sins from us.” —Psalm 103 It has been said that an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. But the life of the mind hardly requires that William and...
“Tell me, can you find indeed Nothing sure, no moral plan Clear prescribed, without your creed?” —Matthew Arnold Awaiting trial for a murder he did not commit, Dmitri Karamazov is visited in jail in the closing pages of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov by the progressive intellectual Rakitin. Rakitin tries to explain why modern ethics no...
“They say such different things at school.” -W.B. Yeats William Butler Yeats, Senator of the Irish Republic, heard about contemporary trends in education from “a kind old nun in a white hood”: The children learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading-books and history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the...
The premise of Citizen Diplomats by Gale Warner and Michael Shuman, with a foreword by Carl Sagan, is simple: America’s elected politicians and professional diplomats have been so inadequate in managing relations with the Soviet Union and coping with the nuclear threat that concerned citizens themselves should do all they can to improve our understanding...
“In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.” —Tocqueville Norman Podhoretz, in the March 11, 1987, Washington Post, describes Sidney Hook as “one of the most courageous intellectuals of the twentieth century.” While this particular description may more aptly be used for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others who have fought for...
“The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.” —H.H. Munro Roger’s Version, John Updike’s latest novel, can be understood best if seen in intimate and serious connection with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. First, the cast of characters: Hester (Esther), Arthur Dimmesdale (Dale Kohler), Roger Chillingworth (Roger Lambert), and Pearl (Paula/Poopsie). The setting...
“A perfect democracy is . . . the most shameless thing in the world.” —Edmund Burke More than 50 years after his death, Irving Babbitt continues to evoke a sympathetic response horn minds and temperaments attuned to the ethical world view fostered by classical and Christian thought. Within the last decade, much of his writing...
“Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused. “ —Rev. Sydney Smith The rarest entity in American writing is the novelist with ideas—that is to say, one who is capable of writing the ideological novel. Of course, the term is enough to put a chill on what is in fact the...
Dr. Lavoie, assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, argues that planning—whether Marxism, economic democracy, or other designation—must inevitably disrupt social and economic coordination. The problem of how to effectively use knowledge in society to produce the goods and services which the public wants cannot be solved by central planning and control. Lavoie takes...
“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain In a rational world, the term “imperialism” might have been a carefully defined and useful tool of political and social analysis, part of the study of how empires come into being. But the story of “imperialism” is typical...
Sprawled on the sands of the New Mexico desert, Isador Isaac Rabi was witness on July 16, 1945, to a demonstration of scientific power so spectacular that neither his welder’s glasses nor his analytical training could fully shield him from its awe-inspiring effects: Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I...
The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means, literally, harm-joy, and refers to the nasty but common human tendency to rejoice when harm comes to someone else. In English, we don’t have the word, but we certainly have the phenomenon. Think of the nationwide jubilation over what happened to Richard Nixon (and, incidentally,...
“Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?” —Juvenal On November 29, 1984, an FBI agent in Massachusetts took extensive notes from a long conversation with an alcoholic woman about the alleged Soviet spy activities of her former husband, John Walker. Barbara Walker initiated the meeting with a phone call on November 17. Her story was filed and...
A renaissance of American interest in contemporary Africa has been stimulated by media blitzes on famine-ridden Ethiopia and politically volatile South Africa, and by an award- winning film about a Norwegian adulteress’s African farm. Among the current crop of books is David Lamb’s The Africans, an update of a 1983 book. Lamb, who spent four...
Along with Xenophon and Plutarch, Herodotus may be the most underappreciated writer of antiquity. His Histories (by which he meant something like “investigations”) of the relations between Greeks and barbarians has more narrative power than most novels, more colorful incidents than any travel book, and more insight into human nature than any 1,000 works of...
“Vilify! Vilify! Some of it will always stick.” —Beaumarchais When I learned some time ago that the critic Kenneth S. Lynn was bringing out a book on the late Ernest Hemingway, hard on the heels of the large biographical study by Jeffrey Myers, I anticipated a reasonably cogent analysis of the stories, the several novels,...
“Modern society acknowledges no neighbor.” —Disraeli Separate thinkers have often thought the same thoughts when the time was ripe. The same needs will be felt, or the same things will be perceived wrong by sociologists in California and philosophers in the Midwest. Perhaps this means our minds are so social that a sense of alienation,...
” . . . Form and Limit belong to the Good.” —C.S. Lewis Liberals in the United States have lately gathered around the standard of pluralism in the hope of stalling the movement toward private Christian education. Yet Americans, historically indifferent to such objections, have been the last to censure a church—especially a reformed or...
“The Devil understands Welsh.” —Shakespeare Years ago, in the North Welsh town of Llanrwst, I bought a copy of Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems, and a 50-year-old Welshman present, a Baptist, teetotalling, nonsmoking, nondancing insurance agent, said, “A wonderful boy and a great poet: a terrible loss to Wales.” It was the first time I had...