All in all, why did I come to this nightmarish New York? To fill my pockets with dollars, and then to go back and live as a money-changer? No. You know that the answer is no. Out of curiosity? Yes. . . . Somehow yes. But most of all out of anxiety. Does this legendary...
No doubt Gorbachev has been entirely misunderstood in the West, and continues to be. The primary myth is that glasnost and perestroika represented fundamental change from the Soviet past. They did not establish Western-style economic or political freedom, as the media led Americans to believe. Instead, each was designed to “improve and perfect” the workings...
He who has seen the present has seen everything, said Marcus Aurelius, and this is why the floor of my study is made concave by the aggregate weight of all the newspapers and magazines I have acquired since moving to Cambridge: I simply cannot bring myself to throw away a single page of newsprint. In...
William James was much concerned about “faith-tendencies,” which he defined as “extremely active psychological forces, constantly outstripping evidence.” The Gorbachev era fully confirms his apprehensions. The eminent psychologist even constructed a seven-rung “faith-ladder”: 1. There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true, nothing self-contradictory; 2. It might have been...
Fisher Ames is the Founding Father who draws a blank. Few people today have heard of him, yet he wrote the final version of the First Amendment, and his speech on Jay’s Treaty, delivered when he was the leader of the Federalists in the First Congress, was called the finest example of American oratory by...
When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism. Nearly sixty years after the New Deal, the American right is no closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery than when Old Rubberlegs first started priming the pump and scheming...
The question, “What is the bottom line?” has entered the lexicon of business as a near metaphysical given. It is so frequently applied to events calling for tough decisionmaking that it seems advisable to take a closer look at its meaning. The phrase signals a no-nonsense approach to business thinking, where presumably decisions are made...
It would be logical for me to say that, returning to the United States after another four months this summer and fall in various countries of Europe, east and west, I found a great many misconceptions about the continent in American media and public opinion. Yet it would not be fair to limit myself to...
Every night, in prime time, a changeling can enter your living room, an inhuman creature secretly usurping a human’s place. It’s an unnatural presence, an electronic phantom with vast and secret motivations; but its presence is so enjoyable and comforting, as well as so familiar (it hastens to assure you), that you really don’t mind...
With the deaths of Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy the specter of the star system is loose again in the land. “Who will be their successors? Who will pick up their mantle?” It’s a plaintive cry, predictable but genuine, largely journalistic and academic—a spume from the wave of canon-making—thinned by its basis in literary...
American society is in trouble, and not only because our traditional values and institutions are under siege. The nuclear family is crumbling as a result of government policies that are ruthless when they are not mindless. Our once great cities have reverted to a state of nature, in which the innocent are terrorized by hordes...
Even as we, in our own time, go about revising, or refusing to revise, our fundamental law, so did our Fathers in the beginning vote to put such law in its place: that is, one state at a time, reflecting, after vigorous dispute, 13 different majorities, some of them very belated—and very reluctant. All of...
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds . . . is every bit as bitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin’ for hayseeds.” —George Washington Plunkitt...
The great conflicts of the future will no longer pit left against right, or East against West, but the forces of nationalism and regionalism against the credo of universal democracy. The lofty ideal of the global village seems to be stumbling over the renewed rise of East European separatism, whose aftershocks may soon spill over...
On December 3, 1989, the London Telegraph included a piece of academic news from the United States: “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, murdered in 1968, was—in addition to his other human failings—a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his...
My friend Dr. Bob grew up in a coal town called Packard in eastern Kentucky, a place that was abandoned years ago. All that is left these days is kudzu growing over old foundations. He’s a neurosurgeon in Louisville now, and an amateur Kentucky historian, and my favorite tale of his is about the blue...
Good News Blues What I started to say, my original impulse, was wrong. Not all wrong, but, anyway, riddled with error and inconsistency. I started to say this: that in many ways, speaking (as we one and all must) from my own limited angle, my assigned point of view, the times we seem to be...
This essay grew out of a request that I conduct a reprise of “The Bull’s Eye of Disaster,” my wrap-up conclusions on the Vietnam War that appeared in the August 1989 Chronicles, in light of what’s happened in the post-Cold War world since that essay appeared. I was thus thrust onto the stage of modern...
“All the evidence shows that differentiation which is not fragmentation is a source of strength. But such differentiation is possible only if there is a center toward which the parts look for their meaning and validation.” —Richard M. Weaver One of the most interesting of many superb memoirs of the American Civil War is that...
Mark Twain once confided that he received public schooling as a child but never let it interfere with his education. Millions today are not so fortunate; for their education is being interfered with. The full extent of the problem came to light in 1983 in four major national studies. (The four reports were as follows:...
F.A. Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, offers us one insight into the nature of freedom and morality. Hayek argues that the major world religions have succeeded and endured because they reinforce the weak and imperfect points of human nature. Hayek believes that civilization is based on the family and on private...
Just after receiving an invitation from the editor of Chronicles to write about the college humanities curriculum, I received a letter from a friend and ally in education reform. It expressed alarm that “I had gone over to the other side”—an opinion that started, according to his letter, when I declined to label myself a...
“Humanities” is Western society’s name for the academic expression of its fundamental values. There are other branches of learning—medicine, law, engineering, and business, all of which benefit from the humanities—but only the “liberal arts” reflect a society’s soul, central beliefs, highest aspirations, and ultimately its culture. Yet during the last half-century America has witnessed the...
For several years now a heated debate has been going on over Western civilization and humanities requirements at some distinguished universities, most notably Stanford. The debate has brought up the question of a justification—or lack thereof—for forcing students into a sequence of courses devoted exclusively to Western thought. It has been argued, correctly, that thinkers...
If asked to state the goal of the environmental movement, a participant in it would probably say something like: “to promote a sustainable relationship between human beings and nature.” How could one possibly object to such a formulation? Yet hidden in it is a set of assumptions that may paradoxically lie at the root of...
More change has occurred in the environmental movement during the past ten years than in its entire previous history. Its thrust has become less ideological and more pragmatic, less New Age and more scientific. It is increasingly grounded in the databases of atmospheric science and the genetic models of conservation biology. The practice of conservation...
Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of tax collecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and if doing so involved the common sense...
Today the United States takes in annually more than twice as many immigrants as all other countries in the world put together. Many Asian countries permit no immigration at all, and openly despise foreigners. The top U.S.immigrant exporter last year, Mexico (with 95,039), is also a vigorous deporter, sending back an average of 150 Central...
Jacob Neusner, Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, University of South Florida Martin Buber Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Frankfurt Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of humanity in democracy. No country in the world other than...
The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite, “neither businessmen nor manufacturers, blue-collar workers or farmers,”...
“In the background of the entire tedious debate over the NEA, the First Amendment has loomed, misunderstood and abused as usual, claimed by some as justification for their right to express a preference for causing pain to others during the sex act and asserted by others as the basis for a constitutional right to receive...
By now it should be obvious that “education reform” is a fraud. Its primary goal has not been to rescue children from public school malpractice, but to rescue the schools from angry parents and taxpayers. The 1980’s saw per-pupil spending climb by about one-third beyond inflation, almost entirely for doing more of the same rather...
Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of great joy for lovers of freedom everywhere. For it was the “revolutionary” year in which totalitarian communism, throughout Eastern Europe and perhaps even in the Soviet Union itself, suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Many of our pundits, equating complexity and permanent quasi-gloom with profundity, sternly warned us...
After eight years in power, conservatives are down in the mouth. The right feels as out in the cold as it was during the wilderness period, fifteen years ago; and this time it does not even have much of a communist menace to fall back upon. Establishment Republicanism, as personified by George Bush, is in...
Washington apparatchiks have spent the last two decades in a frustrating search for a theme that could carry the sagging American welfare state. There are signs now that they have finally identified a, two-headed creature slouching toward Bethlehem-on-the-Potomac to be born: “families” and “children.” Jimmy Carter had a vague sense of the political power behind...
Certain moments in a good story possess a quality that is logically very strange indeed, and that renders them often haunting and unforgettable. Consider Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw as her lover in Middlemarch: the logic of fiction would dictate that Dorothea should pair up with Lydgate, who is a heavyweight like her, and if after...
As I read the announcement and noted with admiration those receiving The Ingersoll Prizes, I can say in all humility that it never entered my head during the past several years that I might someday be so honored, and for that I thank you. I thank you also for the opportunity to make the following...
A text, or an epigraph, for what I am going to say: some lines from John Ciardi’s poem about the Birdman of Alcatraz who was, among other things, a trickster of sorts. These words are from Ciardi’s poem “Snickering in Solitary”: In every life sentence some days are better than others; even, sometimes, better than...
Mikhail Gorbachev has evidently imagined that a government turned virtuous would elicit a generous response from a naturally virtuous people. It is an “immaculate misconception” because the Russian people, always lethargic in the face of their leviathan government, have endured in the Soviet experiment a unique erosion of Edward Gibbon’s old Greco-Roman ideal of civic...
The discussion of “the end of history” by Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest (Summer 1989) has led to comment by numerous publicists. Among others Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Richard Bernstein, and a feature writer for Time have evaluated Fukuyama’s hypothetical arguments that the world may be moving toward a democratic capitalist final age: a...
American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...
“They’re wiping out our industries,” said my southern California friend, staring moodily out across the Pacific ocean beyond which They—the Japanese—presumably lurking even as he spoke. “They’re buying up all our land,” confirmed his wife. “Of course, we’re so stupid, we just let them.” “They need another earthquake over there,” her brother-in-law joked darkly. “That...
“Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew, And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four— And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.” Rudyard...
In 1967, The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber predicted that by the 1980’s American multinationals would have virtually bought up European industry. A decade later, there was another big scare—the Arabs were going to buy up all the US farmland (some farmers now wish this had been true, since the price of farmland subsequently collapsed)....
“The Lyric of Tradition” is an essay written nearly twenty-five years ago by the late Donald Davidson, celebrated American poet, critic, and philosopher of cultural change who developed, out of his own artistic practice, a comprehensive theory of the role of literature in a healthy society. It was a view not at all like those...
Thomas Jefferson believed that virtue was to be found in the Spartan simplicity of ancient Greece rather than in the decadent cities of Caesar’s Rome. Agriculture, Jefferson wrote, was what developed moral and political virtue. Big cities corrupted people, he thought, and neither city men of commerce and capital nor city men who labored could...
The word’s been out for some time: they’re all gone, not a functioning one left. Statistics coming down from on high in the 1970’s “proved” that the small farm—defined as that with a total income of less than $20,000 annually—was about shot. This came as something of a surprise to those still living and working...
An Exercise in Calculated Hysteria The semiautomatic rifle has been part of the American scene for nearly a century. In 1903 the Winchester Repeating Arms Company marketed the first commercially successful semiautomatic rifle. It was not designed as a military arm, and no sales were made to the US Army. The new rifle was marketed...
She was a witch, I swear, she was a real witch! —Gogol When my novella, which I was writing obsessively all my senior year at the Academy and a year after that, was accepted by a publisher and I was given a modest advance, I decided to buy myself an apartment. I, of course, didn’t...
Somebody recently did a “study” purporting to discover that at-home mothers spend hardly any more time daily with their children than mothers who work full-time outside the home. This is a neat trick on the part of the at-home moms surveyed, and I would like to know how they manage it. They must have superb...