Keeping Individual Freedom Through Personal Responsibility: A Moral Approach to Democracy

After nearly 250 years, American democracy and society continue to evolve. In many cases, as limned by astute observers such as Charles Murray, it does so for the worse. In other ways, the transparency brought to governance by the information revolution means that it is ever harder for government to hide its capriciousness and corruption, at least in the long-run. Most importantly, though, the struggle between individual freedom and the strength of the intrusive state continues unabated, perhaps even more intensively in recent years.

John Adams understood with piercing clarity that a moral citizenry is the best defense against the strengthening of state power. A society that is sober, industrious, and frugal will reduce the opportunities for the state to order the lives of its citizens or increase their dependence on the common fisc. Adams's timeless argument, contained in his Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, is perhaps even more important today than when he wrote it in the heady days of the Revolution. You can find an essay on Adams's wisdom here.

A Travel Hiatus

As I travel to Europe and Asia for three conferences over the next several weeks, I will not be posting, but will resume once I return. 

The New Criterion's Clarion Call

The New Criterion is among the finest literary journals published today (I would say the finest, but since it has published two of my pieces, I might be accused of bias). Founded by the late Hilton Kramer, it is currently published by Roger Kimball.

Reading The New Criterion is like spending an hour or so in conversation with the most thoughtful interlocutors in the most congenial intellectual salon. It is a place where serious thoughts are carefully expressed, without the common demand among contemporary media that every problem be offered a solution, many of which turn out to be impracticable or repetitive. Rather, what TNC does so very well is to allow one the leisure of actually thinking. I confess I read less of its excellent monthly reviews of music and the arts, but only because I am so unaware of what is current. If I could publish with them every month, I would happily do so (that desire to be taken as an example of my high regard for the journal, not a plea).

The January issue ran essays from a symposium entitled, "The corruption of our political institutions," held jointly between TNC and London's Social Affairs Unit. Each of the essays was excellent, but the two in particular that resonated with me were Andrew C. McCarthy's "Equality above the law" and Daniel Johnson's "The dereliction of duty." Both remind us that it is our own societies that are failing to uphold civic virtue and the impartiality of law, without which we are thrown back into a world of capriciousness and brutality. I recommend both of them highly, as depressing as they are.

Johnson, by the way, is the founder and editor of Standpoint, another outstanding cultural and political magazine, whose mission is to "celebrate Western civilization." Though they may be pinpricks of light in the darkness of progressive relativism, they, along with a handful of other serious magazines, give hope that the life of the mind will not entirely be snuffed out in the West.

The Pathology of the Professors

Although I was happy to have left American academia, and have been out of that world for almost a decade, I continue to idealize what academia is at its best: a haven for serious reflection on the timeless, central issues of being human. I still get a thrill walking through old universities, thinking about those who labored within those walls, anonymously and with little thought of worldly gain, except in what mattered most: wisdom and knowledge. I wrote a reflective piece about that ideal world when I first visited Merton College, Oxford, the very first of the collegiate communities that led to our modern system of higher education.

The reality, of course, is different. Far from the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, the academy has politicized its teaching, research, and outreach. It has marginalized voices with which it disagrees, and believes that its job is to indoctrinate its students in concepts of social justice, communitarianism, and anti-capitalism. The result is an experience in which American students find themselves alienated from the larger society of which they are a part, radicalized in many of their opinions, under-educated, and ill-equipped to deal with viewpoints and beliefs different from their own.

We saw the fruits of all of this last year in the student protests that rocked campuses from Yale to Missouri. Their intolerance, sense of grievance, and almost pathological sensitivity revealed a deep rot at the core of our universities.

There is no one cause for the perversion of the academy, but over at National Review, I wrote a long essay on perhaps the main source of the problems in today's university: the professors themselves. You can read it here.

Another Wonderful London Antiquarian Twitter Feed

For the Anglophilic Twitter users amongst you, @culturaltales is a wonderful Twitter feed providing lovely images of bygone London and Great Britain. It is the old Londoner Walking's new account. 

Van Wyck Brooks and the American Character

I have been working my way through three volumes of Van Wyck Brook's quintilogy on American literary history, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940); and The World of Washington Irving (1944); all found in our local used bookstore. Brooks was once a well-known name among the educated class, a mentor and intellectual compatriot of Lewis Mumford, and a leading literary critic for nearly a half-century. His writing is among the most idiosyncratic I have encountered, lyrical and emotional, overflowing with the most minute observations, yet unanchored by any but the flimsiest organization.

His deep love of New England and in particular the transcendentalist authors leaves me largely an interested observer of his work and style, though hardly an adherent. But he wrote in an era when liberalism and conservatism were not nearly as ideologically opposed as they now are, and when the fine craftsmanship of a deeply-read mind could appeal to those on either side of the ideological divide.

I wrote a brief piece on his elegiac description of "the best Boston and Cambridge type" of personality from the early 19th century, and how so very far from that idealized type we have traveled to our world today of crude, ignorant, and unrestrained public personages. You can find it here.

How Dogs Helped Us Become Human

I posted last year some initial thoughts on Pat Shipman's book, The Invaders, about the origins of domesticated dogs and the competition between homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Paleoanthropologists, behavioral scientists, and others continue to both push back the dates when wolf-dogs appeared and expand our understanding of just how sophisticated canine is thinking and emotion. Some scientists believe the first wolf-dogs emerged as early as 36,000 years ago, though this is claim is disputed by others. Regardless of the actual date, which we may never know, it is clear that dogs and man have coexisted in a symbiotic relationship thousands of years longer than we have long thought.

The wonderful Claremont Review of Books let me review Shipman's book. I argued that dogs were a critical part of making us human, not merely helping us survive the evolutionary competition with the Neanderthals, not to mention the saber tooth tigers. Given the central role of dogs as hunters, watchers, and workers alongside man in the millennia since they appeared, it is not too hyperbolic to claim that we would not have become the species we are, were it not for our unique partnership with dogs. You can find the essay here.