Is mankind no more than a part of nature, subject to her laws like every other species? Or has the human race transcended natural limits and set itself apart as master of creation? Since the dawn of the 19th century, the debate in the West on these questions bas been heavily influenced by the proposition put forward by the Rev....
Bookshelves
COMMENDABLES Nightfall for Liberalism? by Richard John Neuhaus George Parkin Grant: English Speaking Justice; Notre Dame; $4.95 paper. “Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good-‘conservatives’ included. Insofar as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human good, it is difficult for...
Animals and “Other Awkward Cases”
“[After creating man] He immediately created other animals besides. God’s first blunder: Man didn’t find the animals amusing – he dominated them and didn’t even want to be an ‘animal.'” -Friedrich Nietzsche Bernard E. Rollin: Animal Rights and Human Morality; Prometheus Books; Buffalo, NY. Mary Midgley: Animals and Why They Matter; University ofGeorgia Press; Athens, GA. Wednesday,...
Letter From the Lower Right
Taxing Matters In a North Carolina newspaper not long ago-a North Carolina newspaper – I actually read an editorial urging Tar Heel legislators to raise the state tax on cigarettes. What is the world coming to? The state’s present tax, I gather, is the lowest in the nation. You would think North Carolinians would join in praising their politicians’ restraint,...
Paranoia as Prudence
‘Believing where we cannot prove.” -Tennyson Edith Efron: The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie: How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know About Cancer; Simon & Schuster; New York. “Edith Efron would like to shake the cancer-fighting agencies to their foundations with this book, and perhaps she will.” The New Republic. “The shame of it all...
Art
ART George Stubbs: More Than Horses This spring, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, displayed the first comprehensive survey in the United States of the work of George Stubbs. A self-taught painter, Stubbs (1724-1806) devoted his life to painting animals with consummate skill and remarkable virtuosity. He suffered financial hardship; his twilight years were...
Rights of the Wild and Tame
Conservationists tend to be shy of using any arguments but the merely “economic,” partly in the odd belief that these are more “rational” than other and overtly “sentimental” ones, and partly because “economic” reasoning seems likely to appeal to a larger audience.Economic arguments are not bad ones: it is indeed incompatible with any sort of economic prudence to destroy the...
Do Animals Have Rights?
In recent years we have seen a growing phenomenon dubbed, not very surprisingly, the animal liberation movement. The main theoretician of animal rights is Professor Tom Regan, professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University. Other supporters from the theoretical side are Professor Peter Singer, of La Trobe University in Australia, although Singer speaks only of animal liberation. That is...
Importing Trouble, Exporting Hope
“One scene of arts, of arms, of rising trade . . .” – James Thomson Kevin P. Phillips: Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy; Random House; New York. Michael). Fiore and Charles F. Sabel: The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity; Basic Books; New York. David F. Noble: Forces of Production: A...
Religion is out, fashion is in
So, at least, we might conclude from a poll conducted recently by Starch Advertisement Readership Service, which has been doing door-to-door opinion surveys since the l 930’s. The results of a poll taken in 1953 indicated that the top five areas of interest for American women at that time were: (1) religion, (2) food, (3) homemaking, (4) child care, (5)...
Where are the poets?
We asked conservatives that question in June. And hand in hand On the back steps, my pregnant sister and I Wistfully remember summers here – warm and long A life this awful August will deny Her baby, whose presence now is slightly wrong. Cool wind moves the little field of loosestrife. Their lavender tips are lurid in the...
The fighting over Vietnam is not over
Loyal Americans are still winning the battles but losing the war. Fifteen years ago, American troops were victorious in every major engagement in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but all their efforts came to nothing, because the Presidents who committed us to war (Kennedy and Johnson) never formulated a strategy for victory and be cause many of those who opposed...
Nostalgia Trips
“Long ago there was something in me but now that thing is gone…That thing will come back no more.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald Douglas Unger: Leaving the Land; Harper & Row; New York. William McPherson: Testing the Current; Simon & Schuster; New York. It would be off the mark to regard Douglas Unger’s Leaving the Land and...
Future Directions?
“The way up and the way down are one and the same. “ -Heraclitus Newt Gingrich: Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future; TOR Books; New York. Robert Kuttner: The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. The idea of progress provides much of the rhetorical foundation of modern politics. Everyone...
The Natural Man
This issue brings together a number of discussions of man’s place in nature. Stephen R. L. Clark, Tibor Machan, and jay Mechling explore the implications of the animal rights movement. Debating the “moral status of animals” (to borrow one of Prof. Clark’s titles) is interesting not so much for what it reveals about beasts as for what it might tell...
A Brief Encounter With Bigotry
When I was 17 years of age I was invited by my church to serve at my own expense as a missionary. The assignment was to teach people, especially young people, how to be good Christians. My assignment was to go to England and, at first, everything went fine. The English countryside was beautiful and I felt quite at home...
“A Scientific Faith’s Absurd”
Science, that is, natural and physical science, is supposed to be pure. Those who do science keep their work free from any taint of political belief or social prejudice. The scientific method is itself value-free, beyond good and evil. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, however, scientists are not always so pure. They often lead two lives. In...
The Big Surprise
Charles Murray: Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980; Basic Books; New York. Charles Murray’s book is a study of some of the biggest, and perhaps the least excusable, social problems facing American society. Losing Ground is based on a mass of data, and its message is clear and unmistakable: the benevolent social policies adopted in the 1960’s have not merely failed, have not...
Cold Pricklies & Warm Fuzzies
Joyce Carol Oates: Last Days; E. P. Dutton; New York. Joseph Campos-De Metro: The Slugger Heart & Other Stories; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. At 47, Joyce Carol Oates has to her credit more than 40 books, including 16 rather fat novels and nearly as many collections of not-so-short stories. Ms. Oates is also, however, one of this country’s most widely criticized authors. She...
Mormons and Modernism
“So pale grows Reason at Religion’s sight, So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.” —John Dryden Leonard Arrington: Brigham Young: American Moses; Alfred A. Knopf; New York. Richard L. Bushman: Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Jan Shipps: Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Ernest H. Taves: Trouble Enough: Joseph...
Calhoun and Community
In any discussion of the Old Federalism—at least among that minority whose substantive knowledge of American principles and ideals precedes the beginning of the Kennedy dynasty—the name of John C. Calhoun and his idea of the concurrent majority is likely to come up. Calhoun’s reputation as a political thinker has had its ups and downs. Widely praised in his own time and after, by no...
Fast-Living Frump
Barbara Pym: A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters; Edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym; E. P. Dutton; New York; $19.95. “Be more wicked, if necessary,” Barbara Pym’s agent once suggested as she revised her early novels and prepared to make her first wild dash through the gauntlet of London publishers. “Can you imagine an old spinster,” she responded (she was fast...
Wrongful ‘Rights’
“Men ambitious of political authority have found out the secret of manufacturing generalities. “ -Sir Henry Sumner Maine Donald Lambro: Washington—City of Scandals; Little, Brown; Boston. Richard E. Morgan: Disabling America; Basic Books; New York. The contemporary American political scene does not encourage optimism. Donald Lambro, author of Fat City, documents in minute detail the all-too-numerous Washington scandals. He describes the unearned rewards...
Troubled New Women
Megan Marshall: The Cost of Loving: Women and the New Fear of Intimacy; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York; $14.95. Megan Marshall’s book attests to the resiliency of nature and common sense in human affairs. The Cost of Loving is a chapter in the rise and fall of the feminist ideology. Feminism, like many ideologies, had (Marshall uses the past tense) the characteristics of a religion. What Marshall...
Short Day’s Journey Into Night
Martin Gottfried: Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius; Little, Brown; Boston. The man who called himself Jed Harris was the leading producer and director of the Broadway of the 20’s and 30’s. The staccato pacing of Broadway (1926) won him instant attention and a place on the cover of Time magazine. It turned the American stage from the smarmy sentimentality...
Letter From South Africa
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders, to Afrikaners and Anglos, to people...
Powder Puffs & Loose Peanuts
“It is a hard task to treat what is common in a way of your own.” -Horace Jill McCorkle: The Cheer Leader; Algonquin Books; Chapel Hill, NC; $15.95. Jill McCorkle: July 7th; Algonquin Books; Chapel Hill, NC; $17.95. Louis Rubin is easily the most respected and celebrated scholar of modern Southern literature, but it will never be said of him that he was...
The Conservative Counterrevolution
The term counterrevolution was always used by Lenin and his associates in a pejorative sense. In the Marxist view, since “progress” is irreversible, any gains made by the left are to be considered permanent, while any gains made by the right are to be considered temporary setbacks. The contemporary treatment of revolution and counterrevolu tion in academic writing is a good...
Rumors of War
“Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?” -Tennyson Robert Kee: 1939: In the Shadow of War; Little, Brown; Boston. Gordon Brook-Shepherd: Archduke of Sarajevo; Little, Brown; Boston. Neither Robert Kee nor Gordon Brook-Shepherd has written a masterpiece. Both men cover well trodden fields of research: one, the events of l939 that Winston Churchill aptly called “the Second Thirty-Years War”; and the other the...
Cutting the Mustard
Some 50 years ago a decree went out from Miss Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney that all of New York City and visitors thereunto should be taxed with the newest in American art, that unto us should be biennially given a “qualitative overview of current art activity… the cutting edge.” The bad prose gives you a good idea of what to expect in the current Whitney Biennial,...
Turning Left at Valhalla
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics; Edited by David C. Large and William Weber; Cornell University Press; Ithaca. “We recently had a very serious conversation on the subject of Richard Wagner,” Debussy once remarked to Pierre Louys. “I merely stated that Wagner was the greatest man who ever existed, and went no further. I didn’t say that he was God himself, though...
Life by Teaspoonsful
Peter Handke: The Weight of the World; Translated by Ralph Man heim; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. This combination of writer’s notebook and personal diary by the German novelist, playwright, poet, film writer and director Peter Handke is 243 pages of random perceptions, most of them just a few lines long. They were written between November 1975 and March 1977 while he was...
Fortunately, It’s 1985
Nineteen Eighty-Four; Written and Directed by Michael Radford; Virgin Films. The concept of a filmed version of 1984 wasn’t without merit. After all, the timing seemed right. And when the final credits roll, we can see how precisely writer-director Michael Rad ford timed it. That is, a title explains that the film was shot in England in April-May 1984: the period Orwell described. If...
Comparable Worth?
“On the whole, the home remains the supreme cultural achievement of women.” -Georg Simmel Elisabeth Griffith: In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Oxford University Press; New York. Kathleen Brady: Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker; Seaview/Putnam; New York. Near the turn of the century Charles Peguy, alarmed by the advance of secularism in the modern world, predicted that the true...
Why Another Magazine of Ideas?
Leopold Tyrmand founded Chronicles in 1977 to provide a conservative and “value-oriented criticism” of arts and letters, morals and manners. From the very first, Tyrmand’s Chronicles exposed the pretentions of the radical chic culture and subjected the permissive, “anything goes” world view of liberalism to an eloquent and withering scorn. Under his editorship, the magazine published such distinguished writers and...
Psyche
Words like liberal and conservative have been losing whatever meaning they once had. An old Tory would not have seen anything very conservative in free trade, and Senator Bob Taft would certainly have had reservations about America’s role as international policeman. But liber al still has discernible significance in ethics, where the great liberal traditions of Locke, Adam Smith, and the Utilitarians are carried on by able...
Friends of the Family
Everyone wants to save the American family. Not a day goes by, it seems, without some politician or professor issuing a call to arms or an invitation to a congressional hearing. For a long time the family had been a conservative/ Republican issue, but last fall both Mr. Mondale and Ms. Ferraro made a great show of their own wholesome...
Uncle Joe & the Space Invaders
Now Random House offers a computer program to be used in college-level introductory sociology courses. Social Indicators Game, written by Robert K. Leik, et al., is both a learning drill and a game, but not the arcade variety with joystick controller and sound effects. Insert the diskette in the Apple II disk drive, turn the power on, and you are told that...
Canned Heat
Ernest van den Haag: Smashing Liberal Icons: A Collection of Debates; The Heritage Foundation; Washington, DC. When the adversaries are aggressive and the topics provocative, debates are stimulating entertainment. And, too, many vigorous minds have shared Samuel Johnson’s relish for “talking for victory.” But for participant and auditor alike, the excitement is in being there—in the tones and rhythms of voice, in...
Cultural Revolutions
Heroes are back in style. According to a recent poll, the approval ratings given to the objects of our admiration are up significantly from a few years back. The official story goes something like this: back in the bad old days of Vietnam and Watergate, the Ameri can people lost their youthful idealism and learned to distrust all figures of authority....
Transplanted Texan
Our literary establishment seems designed to ensure that a writer’s first novel is his best. Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and J.D. Salinger are only a few of the better-known novelists whose first work defined the acme of their creative careers. (In the case of John Barth, the second novel, The End of the Road, was aptly named.) The...
Revolution on the Right: The End of Bourgeois Conservatism?
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington area and in Florida, police...
In Focus
The Light From the East by Lee Congdon Martin Jay: Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept From Lukacs to Habermas; University of California Press; Berkeley, CA. Like the exponents of Critical Theory, the subjects of his first book, Martin Jay considers himself to be an “extraterritorial” outsider. Professor of history at the University of California at...
Thunder on the Right
National Reviewhas been the flagship of the conservative movement for almost 30 years. From the very beginning, its editors set the agenda for American conservatism. NR’s peculiar mixture of capitalist anticommunism with the concerns of traditional Catholicism defined the movement. Even before being cursed with the name “fusionism,” it was a potent combination. Where else in the 1950’s could you...
Shine, Perishing Republic
Murray Rothbard recently described American conservatism as “chaos and old night.” Apart from the nasty implication that we are all dunces, there is something to what he says. It is getting harder every year to figure out just what it is that makes a conservative. Consider Newt Gingrich-the Carl Sagan of politics. He wants to colonize the stars, mine the...
Polemics & Exchanges
On Weapons of Despair by Brian Murray In his February review of Kosta Tsipis’s Arsenal and Freeman Dyson’s Weapons and Hope, Professor William Hawkins rightly reminds us that both geopolitical rubes and hard-core leftists are well represented in the “no nukes” movement that has in recent years received considerable, not unfavorable, attention in the Western press. If we disarmed, argue...
Letter From Central America
World attention focused on Managua several months ago, as leaders of the Socialist world, led by Fidel Castro, converged on Nicaragua for the most stupendous Marxist levee since Ethiopia’s $100 million bash for Colonel Mengistu. Meanwhile, thousands of Nicaraguan campesinos, dubbed “contras” by their enemies, continued to risk their lives in a voluntary, patriotic, and very lonely struggle against totalitarianism....
Cultural Revolutions
Capitalism is now avant-garde. A recent issue of the New Art Examiner chronicled the pioneering work of two men from Battle Mountain, Nevada, who together constitute United Art Contractors. UAC explains their breakthrough in conceptual art as a shortcut to success: Every artist wants success and fame and if they could get it easily they would. We just bought...
In the Mail
Science Fiction in America, 1870’s-1930’s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources by Thomas D. Clareson; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Although the first entry is Flatland and the final is Zamitan’s We, the second and the penultimate are more telling: number two, The Man With the Broken Ear, includes a character who believes that “humans are watches”; number 837, A Manless...
Special-Interest Democracy
“Millions endeavoring to supply Each other’s lust and vanity.” – Bernard Mandeville Milton and Rose Friedman: The Tyranny of the Status Quo; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. Amitai Etzioni: Capital Corruption; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. It is a commonplace that modern democracy suffers from a grave malady, namely the dominance of sectional interest...