tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68648669395956766372024-03-12T16:12:44.444-07:00CINCINNATUS'S PLOUGHSHAREJ.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-32087033293874541892016-09-17T08:19:00.000-07:002016-09-17T08:19:33.859-07:00101 Reasons NOT to Vote For Donald Trump<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>(and NOT for Hillary Clinton either) or, 101 Reasons Not to Opt for Scylla or Charybdis</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Two hundred and twenty years ago today, George Washington finished his Farewell Address, in which he articulated both his hopes and dreams for our future and issued wisdom and warnings to us regarding our political and civic order. You may consider the content of Washington's Farewell Address as your first reason for not voting for Donald Trump this November.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>1.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings, which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those, who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection ... The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty ... In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course, which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism; this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- George Washington, "The Farewell Address," September 17, 1796</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">As a traditional conservative, I am not one who objects to the two-party system. Our two-party system follows naturally from the intellectual history of our political philosophy, as exemplified by opposing schools of thought represented, on one side by Edmund Burke, John Adams, and the Federalists, and, on the other side, by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and the anti-federalists. To a far greater extent than most people today may realize, Modern Liberalism follows both naturally and logically from classical liberalism and social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hillary Clinton advocates for a progressivism that can be reasonably derived from the thinking of Enlightenment liberalism. This is a misguided school of thought that has caused a great deal of damage throughout world history, and traditional conservatives reject it at its very root assumptions.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">While past Republican presidents and candidates have occasionally represented the Burkean conservatism that pervades our Constitutional civic order badly or incompetently, no Republican nominee has entirely rejected the underlying values of traditional conservatism as Donald Trump has. Trump’s flippant vulgarity, arrogant demagoguery and pandering populism is not conservative. His nomination may very well be the death of the Republican Party. This is not entirely new. The Federalist Party grew corrupt and, after the death of Alexander Hamilton, fell away from Burkean conservatism by 1815 into nonexistence. Later, the Whig Party floundered in the turbulent and highly polarized times before the American Civil War, dissolving by 1856 for lack of any coherent or principled leadership.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I have always held, and still do hold, a natural disdain for wasting one’s vote upon unserious fringe third party candidates. Those who insist on throwing away their votes based upon some sort of doctrinaire or ideological purity are not really interested in accomplishing anything real. Refusing to compromise and refusing to vote for a candidate who does not agree with all of one’s views is unrealistic. However, since the traditionalists failed to stop Trump from obtaining the Republican nomination, I have hoped and prayed for a serious third party candidate in 2016. The sad truth is that there isn’t one.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Gary Johnson doesn’t have a chance any more than any Libertarian Party candidate has ever had a chance. Libertarians have always leaned more favorably towards ideological purity than political realism, and their values are closer to the roots of liberalism than they would have you believe. The Constitution Party makes the libertarians look like realists by comparison, and their willingness to entertain right-wing conspiracy theories sinks any remaining credibility they may have begun with. Better for America’s Evan McMullin is quixotic, and I admire him for it. He seems like a decent fellow. In a better world, he would be a third choice up on the debate platform, offering calm reasoned restraint in the face of Trump’s insults and Clinton’s smugness. But when your primary qualification for candidacy is that “no one else would do it,” you are not realistically starting up the next major party to replace the Republicans. The American Solidarity Party's nominee is a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and KIDabra International. He currently entertains “at corporate events, banquets, holiday parties, [sic] fundraiser and children's birthday parties. He is currently writing, designing and building his first full-length stage illusion show, titled ‘The Dream.'”</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This does not mean we ought not to vote. At present, there is simply no real presidential candidate for whom I can justifying voting for. Like many others, I will likely be tempted to write-in Senator Ben Sasse as I did during the California primary. But this is all the more reason to still cast your votes for every other office, local and national. If we are going to have a dishonest and power hungry president who does not believe in Constitutional law, then we need other good and true men and women serving in political offices across the land, in the Congress, in the governorships, in the state legislatures and assemblies, and in our city councils.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Ergo, in the spirit of traditionalist conservative sensibility, collected below are one hundred further reasons not to vote for Donald Trump, or, for that matter, not to vote for Hillary Clinton either.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">(Note: I've used red text below to indicate Trump or Trump's supporters.)</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">--</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>2.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but they cannot be brought together unless they are attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey, of which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste only to the mob. Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven mad by the stings of the drones, and so become downright oligarchs in self-defence. Then follow informations and convictions for treason. The people have some protector whom they nurse into greatness, and from this root the tree of tyranny springs. The nature of the change is indicated in the old fable of the temple of Zeus Lycaeus, which tells how he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other victims will turn into a wolf. Even so the protector, who tastes human blood, and slays some and exiles others with or without law, who hints at abolition of debts and division of lands, must either perish or become a wolf – that is, a tyrant.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Plato, <i>The Republic</i>, Book VIII</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>3.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Revolutions in democracies are generally caused by the intemperance of demagogues ... The truth of this remark is proved by a variety of examples. At Cos the democracy was overthrown because wicked demagogues arose, and the notables combined. At Rhodes the demagogues not only provided pay for the multitude, but prevented them from making good to the trierarchs the sums which had been expended by them; and they, in consequence of the suits which were brought against them, were compelled to combine and put down the democracy. The democracy at Heraclea was overthrown shortly after the foundation of the colony by the injustice of the demagogues ... For sometimes the demagogues, in order to curry favor with the people, wrong the notables and so force them to combine; either they make a division of their property, or diminish their incomes by the imposition of public services, and sometimes they bring accusations against the rich that they may have their wealth to confiscate ... History shows that almost all tyrants have been demagogues who gained the favor of the people by their accusation of the notables. At any rate this was the manner in which the tyrannies arose in the days when cities had increased in power ... Panaetius at Leontini, Cypselus at Corinth, Peisistratus at Athens, Dionysius at Syracuse, and several others who afterwards became tyrants, were at first demagogues.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Aristotle, <i>Politics</i>, Book Five, Part X</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>4.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Proverbs 6:16-19, <i>KJV</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>5.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“For the leaders of this people cause them to err; and they that are led of them are destroyed.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Isaiah 9:16, <i>KJV</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>6.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the Lord, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Isaiah 32:5-7, <i>KJV</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Coleridge comments on the above passage as follows:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Such are the political empirics, mischievous in proportion to their effrontery and ignorant in proportion to their presumption, the detection and exposure of whose true characters the inspired statesman and patriot represents as indispensable to the re-establishment of the general welfare, while [the prophet Isaiah’s] own portrait of these impostors whom in a former chapter (ix. 15) he calls, the tail of the nation, and in the following verse, demagogues that cause the people to err, afford to the intelligent believer of all ages and countries the means of detecting them, and of undeceiving all whose malignant passions have not rendered them blind and deaf and brutish. For these noisy and calumnious zealots, whom (with an especial reference indeed to the factious leaders of the populace who under this name exercised a tumultuary despotism in Jerusalem, at once a sign and a cause of its approaching downfall) St. John beheld in the Apocalyptic vision as a compound of locust and scorpion, are not of one place or of one season. They are the perennials of history: and though they may disappear for a time, they exist always in the egg and need only a distempered atmosphere and an accidental ferment to start up into life and activity.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, <i>Lay Sermons</i>, 1817</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>7.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“On my authority, therefore, deride and despise all those who imagine that from the precepts of such as are now called rhetoricians they have gained all the powers of oratory, and have not yet been able to understand what character they hold, or what they profess; for indeed, by an orator everything that relates to human life, since that is the field on which his abilities are displayed, and is the subject for his eloquence, should be examined, heard, read, discussed, handled, and considered; since eloquence is one of the most eminent virtues; and though all the virtues are in their nature equal and alike, yet one species is more beautiful and noble than another; as is this power, which, comprehending a knowledge of things, expresses the thoughts and purposes of the mind in such a manner, that it can impel the audience whithersoever it inclines its force; and, the greater is its influence, the more necessary it is that it should be united with probity and eminent judgment; for if we bestow the faculty of eloquence upon persons destitute of these virtues, we shall not make them orators, but give arms to madmen.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Cicero, <i>De Oratore</i>, 3.54-55</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>8.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Nicias, in this affair, was not only unjust to himself, but to the state. He suffered Cleon by this means to gain such an ascendancy, as led him to a degree of pride and effrontery that was insupportable. Many evils were thus brought upon the commonwealth, of which Nicias himself had his full share. We cannot but consider it as one great corruption, that Cleon now banished all decorum from the general assembly. It was he who in his speeches first broke out into violent exclamations, threw back his robes, smote upon his thigh, and ran from one end of the rostrum to the other. This soon introduced such a licentiousness and disregard to decency among those who directed the affairs of state, that it threw the whole government into confusion.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Plutarch, “Nicias,” <i>Plutarch’s Lives</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>9.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Popular demagogues always call themselves the people, and when their own measures are censured, cry out, the people, the people are abused and insulted.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- John Adams, “Addressed to the Inhabitants of the Province of Massachusetts Bay,” April 3, 1775</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>10.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“History will teach us ... that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Alexander Hamilton, <i>The Federalist</i>, No. 1, October 27, 1787</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>11.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- James Madison, <i>The Federalist</i>, No. 63, March 1, 1788</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>12.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted. The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. It is a just observation, that the people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it. They know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Alexander Hamilton, <i>The Federalist</i>, No. 71, March 18, 1788</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>13.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- George Washington, “Letter to Alexander Hamilton,” August 28, 1788</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>14.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their opinions. No such thing, I assure you ... [P]ray do not imagine ... that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Edmund Burke, <i>Reflections on the Revolution in France</i>, 1790</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>15.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in the patois of fraud; in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Edmund Burke, <i>Reflections on the Revolution in France</i>, 1790</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>16.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"I must confess I am touched with a sorrow, mixed with some indignation, at the conduct of a few men, once of great rank, and still of great character, who, deluded with specious names, have engaged in a business too deep for the line of their understanding to fathom; who have lent their fair reputation, and the authority of their high-sounding names, to the designs of men with whom they could not be acquainted; and have thereby made their very virtues operate to the ruin of their country."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Edmund Burke, <i>Reflections on the Revolution in France</i>, 1790</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>17.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"Unluckily too, the credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Edmund Burke, <i>A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly</i>, 1791</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>18.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"In matters so ridiculous, it is hard to be grave. On a view of their consequences it is almost inhuman to treat them lightly."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Edmund Burke, <i>A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly</i>, 1791</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>19.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The first pillar in the temples of Republicanism is correct and stable morality. All Republics are predicated upon this principle; without it they cannot exist. Without virtue and tolerance in rulers, and obedience and respect in people, Constitutions are waste paper and laws a mockery. When ambition, wild and lawless seizes on the citizen entrusted with the government; when licentiousness diffuses itself through the community and corrupts the sources of power, that Republic is doomed to destruction. Mounds of paper and parchment cannot arrest its progress; the voice of reason will be drowned and Liberty expire. Over men void of principle laws have no force, when they can be transgressed with impunity. If you can stay the current of the ocean by a bullrush, then may you impede the course of an aspiring, triumphing demagogue by throwing in his way the laws of his Country.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Daniel Webster, "4th of July Oration," July 4, 1802</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>20.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“It would be childish, to think a demagogue will be a disinterested patriot. It would be absurd, to expect that anybody, but a patriot of the loftiest elevation of soul, would prefer the public to himself, and would turn himself out of office by doing thankless and unpopular acts of duty.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Fisher Ames, “Lessons From History, No. I,” 1806</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>21.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Or we may find, perhaps, a professional man of showy accomplishments but of a vulgar taste, and shallow acquirements, who in part from vanity, and in part as means to introduction to practice, will seek notoriety by an eloquence well calculated to set the multitude agape, and <i>exite gratis</i> to over-acts of sedition or treason which he may afterwards be retained to defend ... In harmony with the general character of these false prophets are the particular qualities assigned to them. First, a passion for vague and violent invective, an habitual and inveterate predilection for the language of hate, and rage and contumely, an ungoverned appetite for abuse and defamation. The vile will talk villany.” <i>(italics added)</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, <i>Lay Sermons</i>, 1817</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>22.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“We have seen recently the breath of a demagogue blow these sparks into a temporary flame, which I sincerely hope is now extinguished in its own ashes.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Sir Walter Scott, <i>Rob Roy</i>, 1817</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>23.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The people of England are not so far divorced from their ancient valour, that after having withstood Napoleon and the whole world in arms, they are to sink before a horde of their manumitted serfs, and the <i>nisi prius</i> demagogue whom a foreign priesthood have hired to talk treason on their blasphemous behalf. After having routed the lion, we will not be preyed upon by the wolf ... Let it not be said that we truckled to one, the unparalleled and unconstitutional scope of whose power is only equalled by the sordid meanness of his rapacious soul. Let it not be said that the English constitution sank before a rebel without dignity and a demagogue without courage. This grand pensionary of bigotry and sedition presumes to stir up the people of England against your high estate. Will [we] quail to this brawling mercenary - this man who has even degraded crime ... whose philanthropy is hired by the job - audacious, yet a poltroon - agitating a people, yet picking their pockets; in mind a Catiline, in action a Clean?” <i>(italics added)</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Benjamin Disraeli, “Letter To the House of Lords,” April 18, 1836</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>24.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“While we are talking about the importance of education, the lawless spirit is passing over the land, and our children are growing up to be leaders of mobs, the mere tools of demagogues, or, what is worse, to be demagogues themselves. It is time that something be done, and be done quickly, and be done effectually.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Orestes A. Brownson, “An Address on Popular Education Delivered in Winnisimmet Village,” July 23, 1837</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>25.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Large democracies ... are unable to scrutinize and understand character with the severity and intelligence that are of so much importance in all representative governments, and consequently the people are peculiarly exposed to become the dupes of demagogues and political schemers, most of the crimes of democracies arising from the faults and designs of men of this character ... A demagogue, in strict signification of the word, is ‘a leader of the rabble.’ ... The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people. Sometimes the object is to indulge malignancy, unprincipled and selfish men submitting but to two governing motives, that of doing good to themselves, and that of doing harm to others ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">There is no safer rule in selecting a representative, than that already named; or that of choosing the man for public confidence, who may be relied on, in private. Most of all is the timeserver and demagogue to be avoided, for such a man is certain to use power as an instrument of his private good.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- James Fenimore Cooper, <i>The American Democrat</i>, 1838</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>26.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others ... Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>27.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“There are who triumph in a losing cause,</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Who can put on defeat, as ‘t were a wreath</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Unwithering in the adverse popular breath,</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Safe from the blasting demagogue’s applause;</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">‘Tis they who stand for Freedom and God’s laws.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- James Russell Lowell, “To John G. Palfrey,” 1848</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>28.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“He goes out into life, and the brilliancy of incipient success, and the hosannas with which the first dawn of genius is ever greeted, dazzle him more and mislead him farther. Temptation comes, and against the vices that taint and cripple the man he is not provided, nor does he care to be. His aspirations, lofty at first, learn to bend down and shape themselves to the low issues which the world presents. And then, when the vulgar ambitions of the day, for place, popularity and preferment, get possession of him, then the door is wide open for all the rabble rout of earthy passions and petty aims. He sinks into the sensualist, the schemer, or the demagogue. He crawls and shuffles, or towers and blusters, till all his canting of truth and principle, of honor and patriotism, becomes a mockery, too shallow to pass. And then, where is the man? Where and what his intellect is, we know, but where is the man? Just where intellect, trusting wholly in its own gifts and culture, will always put a man … Such men are to be found in all histories and all times; in our own history, and our own time.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- George Putnum, <i>The Boston Book: Being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature</i>, 1850</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>29.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“[I]t has become almost proverbial that the demagogue is made of the same stuff as the courtier. His flattery and his willingness to surrender his own convictions to the wishes of his master, are the same; and although open rivalry of opposing parties in modern popular government gives an opportunity for criticism upon the management of affairs which does not exist under an absolute monarchy, it furnishes also a means of openly tempting the sovereign people to change its ministers by offers of fresh benefits to be derived from the spoliation of individuals.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Abbott Lawrence Lowell, “Democracy and the Constitution,” <i>Essays on Government</i>, 1889</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>30.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“And by as much as mature and capable minds withdraw from political life, by so much are the well-intentioned masses more easily led astray by sharp and self-interested politicians and politics made to cater to mean instincts. In short, the danger is not from any wild lawlessness, but from a crass philistinism. The seditious demagogue who appeals to passion is less dangerous than the sly political wire-puller who exploits the indolence and indifference of the people; the evil intent is less to be feared than dilettanteism and the intellectual limitations of the general public.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Hugo Münsterberg, <i>The Americans</i>, 1904</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>31.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“If you can keep your head when all about you </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> But make allowance for their doubting too; </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise ...</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> If all men count with you, but none too much; </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you can fill the unforgiving minute </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!"</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Rudyard Kipling, “If-,” <i>Rewards and Fairies</i>, 1910</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>32.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“This is what President Lowell of Harvard College meant when he said that we ought to know who the demagogue is and how he accomplishes his purposes. President Lowell, with all other borad-minded educators and statesmen, would say that the demagogue is, after all, but the symptom of a wide-spread disease in the body politic. It is almost prosaic to say, in this connection, that the demagogue is called into being by the indifference and inaction of the otherwise intelligent and reliable citizens of the community. While these individuals neglect their civil duties, the party spoilsman and his retinue toil onward into positions of trust and responsibility, and become so intrenched in power that they even wilfully disregard public sentiment and often defy the authority of the courts.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Frederic W. Smith, “Democracy Versus Socialism,” <i>The Christian Register</i>, October 13, 1910</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>33.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Every raw demagogue, every noisy agitator, incapable of connected thought and seeking his own advancement by the easy method of appealing to envy, malice, and all uncharitableness - those unlovely qualities in human nature which so readily seek for gratification under the mask of high sounding and noble attributes - all such people now lift their hands to tear down or remake the Constitution ... The Constitution is our fundamental law. Upon its provisions rests the entire fabric of our institutions ... Such a work is not to be lightly cast down or set aside, or, which would be still worse, remade by crude thinkers and by men who live only to serve and flatter in their own interest the emotion of the moment.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Constitution and Its Makers: An Address Delivered Before The Literary and Historical Association of North Carolina,” November 28, 1911</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>34.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Surely, this is a lesson that democracies should learn, that knowledge, real knowledge, born of travail of thought and experience, differentiating as it does, the physician from the quack, the lawyer from the shyster, the statesman from the demagogue, is likewise the first indispensable element of educational sanity and progress.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- William Seneca Sutton, <i>Problems in Modern Education: Addresses and Essays</i>, 1918</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>35.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“By the past we are shaped; to the past we are bound by an irrefragable link; from the past we gain whatever knowledge and inspiration are ours. He who would dispense with the past, would dispense with religion, morals, wisdom. He would be an atheist and a monster. What is the cunning of a modern demagogue if you match it against the accumulated wisdom of two thousand years? Indeed, in these days, when we are given no principle to guide us, when we have no leaders who look beyond the day after to-morrow, the one thing to which we can hold tight with some sense of security is the past, and if that be dismissed as ‘irrelevant,’ then shall we be working in the dark without hope or belief, and end of us ... is not far off.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Charles Whibley, “Musings without Method,” <i>Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine</i>, Volume 211, April 1922</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>36.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“When there is great unrest, partly reasoning and partly utterly unreasoning and unreasonable, it becomes extremely difficult to beat a loudmouthed demagogue, especially if he is a demagogue of great wealth.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Teddy Roosevelt, "Letter to Henry Cabot Lodge"</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>37.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The men who do iniquity in the name of patriotism, of reform, of Americanism, are merely one small division of the class that has always existed and will always exist, - the class of hypocrites and demagogues, the class that is always prompt to steal the watchwords of righteousness and use them in the interests of evil-doing.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Teddy Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” <i>The Forum Magazine</i>, April 1894</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>38.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“If we had a Socratic remnant one of its chief concerns would be to give a civilized content to the catch-words that finally govern the popular imagination. The sophist and the demagogue flourish in an atmosphere of vague and inaccurate definition. With the aid of the Socratic critic, on the other hand, Demos might have some change of distinguishing between its friends and flatterers - something that Demos has hitherto been singularly unable to do. Let one consider those who have posed with some success as the people’s friends from Cleon of Athens to Marat; and from Marat to William Randolph Hearst. It would sometimes seem, indeed, that the people might do very well were it not for its ‘friends.’”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Irving Babbitt, <i>Democracy and Leadership</i>, 1924</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>39.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Their minds cannot grasp even the simplest of abstractions; all their thinking is done on the level of a few primitive appetites and emotions ... Thus ideas leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental - the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men ... Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of this fact, and make it the cornerstone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting ‘Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!’ ... The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities. The former are shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down; the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them. The demagogue himself, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman, usually comes ignominiously to grief.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- H.L. Mencken, <i>Notes on Democracy</i>, 1926</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>40.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The demagogue is usually one of the rich (Cleisthenes, Gracchi, Empedocles, Roosevelt) who from sympathy with the poor goes over to their side.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Robert Frost, “Notebook 1930-1940,” <i>The Notebooks of Robert Frost</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>41.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Karl Kraus</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>42.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“I wish that the classical conception of wisdom might be restored, so that we might not be left wholly to the political scientist on the one hand, or the demagogue on the other.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- T.S. Eliot, “Catholicism and International Order,” <i>Essays Ancient and Modern</i>, 1936</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>43.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, <i>Flight to Arras</i>, 1942</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>44.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“[A] gentleman whom we will call Cleon ... is a man who disseminates for money falsehoods calculated to produce envy, hatred, suspicion and confusion ... In a priggish or self-righteous society Cleon would occupy the same social status as a prostitute. His social contacts would extend only to clients, fellow-professionals, moral welfare-workers and the police. Indeed, in a society which was rational as well as priggish (if such a combination could occur) his status would be a good deal lower than hers. The intellectual virginity which he has sold is a dearer treasure ... He gives his patrons a baser pleasure than she. He infects them with more dangerous diseases ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">And that one thing which he does and we do not do is poisoning the whole nation. To prevent the poisoning is an urgent necessity. It cannot be prevented by the law: partly because we do not wish the law to have too much power over freedom of speech, and partly, perhaps, for another reason. The only safe way of silencing Cleon is by discrediting him. What cannot be done - and indeed ought not to be done - by law, can be done by public opinion.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- C.S. Lewis, “After Priggery - What?,” <i>The Spectator</i>, December 7, 1945</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>45.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Concentration on antisemitic propaganda had been a common device of demagogues ever since the end of the nineteenth century, and was widespread in the Germany and Austria of the twenties.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Hannah Arendt, <i>The Origins of Totalitarianism</i>, 1951</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>46.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Unlike human reason, human power is not only ‘timid and cautious when left alone,’ it is simply non-existent unless it can rely on others; the most powerful king and the least scrupulous of all tyrants are helpless if no one obeys them, that is, supports them through obedience; for, in politics, obedience and support are the same.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Hannah Arendt, <i>On Revolution</i>, 1963</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>47.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Senator [McCarthy] is a heavy-handed slugger who telegraphs his fouls in advance. What is worse, he has to learn from consequences or counselors that he has fouled. I know he thinks this is a superior technique that the rest of us are too far behind to appreciate. But it is repetitious and unartful, and, with time, the repeated dull thud of the low blow may prove to be the real factor in his undoing. Not necessarily because the blow is low, or because he lacks heart and purpose, but because he lacks variety, and, in the end, simply puts the audience to sleep.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Whittaker Chambers,<i> Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr.</i>, 1968</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>48.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“At the present time, we have a population that is literate, in the sense that everybody is able to read and write; but, owing to the emphasis placed on scientific and technical training at the expense of the humanities, very few of our people have been taught to understand and handle language as an instrument of power. This means that, in this country alone, forty million innocents or thereabouts are wandering inquisitively about the laboratory, enthusiastically pulling handles and pushing buttons, thereby releasing uncontrollable currents and electric speech, with results that astonish themselves and the world. Nothing is more intoxicating than a sense of power: the demagogue who can sway crowds, the journalist who can push up the sales of his paper to the two-million mark, the playwright who can plunge an audience into an orgy of facile emotion, the parliamentary candidate who is carried to the top of the poll on a flood of meaningless rhetoric, the ranting preacher, the advertising salesman of material or spiritual commodities, are all playing perilously and irresponsibly with the power of words, and are equally dangerous whether they are cynically unscrupulous or (as frequently happens) have fallen under the spell of their own eloquence and become the victims of their own propaganda. For the great majority of those whom they are addressing have no skill in assessing the value of words and are as helpless under verbal attack as the citizens of Rotterdam against assault from the air.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Dorothy L. Sayers, “Creative Mind,” <i>Christian Letters To A Post-Christian World</i>, 1969</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>49.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“For the discipline of education of the broad and humane sort that Jefferson had in mind, to produce a ‘natural aristocracy … for the instruction, the trusts, and governments of society,’ we have tended more and more to substitute the specialized training that will most readily secure the careerist in his career. For the ownership of ‘a little portion of land’ we have, and we apparently wish, to substitute the barbarous abstraction of nationalism, which puts our minds within the control of whatever demagogue can soonest rouse us to self-righteousness.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope,” <i>A Continuous Harmony</i>, 1970</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>50.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Not the slightest hesitation in her voice, in her argument: ‘What makes a man a tyrant is that he flouts the law for his own purposes, not with the authority bestowed on him from above. A tyrant feels no responsibility to heaven, and that is what distinguishes him from a monarch.’”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, <i>November 1916: The Red Wheel</i>, 1983</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>51.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Donald Trump, <i>Esquire Magazine</i>, 1991</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>52.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“We believe that it is possible to avoid these dire consequences ... It is our hope that knowledge about the process of persuasion will allow all of us to detect and resist some of the more obvious forms of trickery and demagoguery. Perhaps, more importantly, it should encourage us to be aware of the consequences of our selection of persuasion devices. After all, an individual’s choice of persuasion tactics reveals much about his or her character and ability to think about the issues at hand.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Anthony R. Pratkanis & Elliot Aronson, <i>Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion</i>, 1992</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>53.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Many people are inflamed by the rampant demagoguery in the present scene ... What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430187/william-f-buckley-donald-trump-demagoguery-cigar-aficionado">William F. Buckley, Jr., <i>Cigar Aficionado</i>, March 2000</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>54.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me - consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Donald Trump, <i>How to Get Rich</i>, 2004</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>55.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"It is, of course, much less difficult to arouse genuine anger, indignation, and outrage in people than it is to induce joy, satisfaction, fellow feeling, etc. The latter are fragile and complex, and what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et al. are more primal, universal, and easy to stimulate (as implied by expressions like 'He really pushed my buttons')."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- David Foster Wallace, “Host,” <i>Consider the Lobster And Other Essays</i>, 2005</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>56.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“I am well aware of the proposition that citizens ought to exercise their right to vote at every election. Even so, I did not vote in Kentucky's gubernatorial primary on May 27. I did not vote because there was nobody on the ballot whom I wished to help elect. I could not bring myself to submit again to the indignity of trying to pick the least undesirable candidate; nor did I want to contribute to the ‘mandate’ of a new governor, who would be carried into office by corporate contributions, and whose policies I would spend the next four years regretting or opposing ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">But my concern has to do not so much with the candidates' ‘positions’ as with their willful refusal to raise and deal openly with substantive issues of conservation and stewardship, fiscal policy, and the economies of energy, land use and education. There is nothing merely personal about this. It is a fact that voters concerned about conservation and economic responsibility had no candidate in the recent primary. Such voters had a vote but not a choice, for no candidate of their choosing was on the ballot. If you have a vote but no choice, then not to vote is the only available choice ... The voters don't trust the government, and they don't feel represented by it. This is a crisis of our democratic system – to give the people a vote but not a choice is a procedure common to modern dictatorships – but it is a crisis that has been officially unnoticed for a long time ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">That I did not vote does not mean that I no longer believe in voting. I take my citizenship in this state as seriously as I can. I want to vote, but I want to vote for a candidate who I am sure takes seriously the thoughts of mere citizens, and who will not listen only to the largest contributors. I think I have a ‘right to vote’ for a candidate who is at least trustworthy. Because I do want to be a citizen and a voter, I suppose it is likely that I will sooner or later return to the polls, grit my teeth, hold my nose, and give my vote to yet another candidate for fame and fortune who has done nothing to earn my respect. But such a vote is not a right. It is a humiliation and a disgrace. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">What then could be done to restore the confidence of our state's thousands of disaffected or disappointed voters? ... A possibility is that of printing an additional entry on the ballot to make it formally possible to vote for ‘None of the above.’ This would be cheaper and easier than passing a law to control contributions. It might also be more effective. I admit that, for all anybody can tell, only a few cranks would vote for ‘None of the above.’ But it might also happen, for all anybody can tell, that ‘None of the above’ would win the election. If a few of the more exalted state offices were to be occupied for a term or two by ‘None of the above,’ there would be less need to clean up Frankfort.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Wendell Berry, “Why I chose not to vote,” <i>The Courier-Journal</i>, July 2, 2007</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>57.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“While most false dilemmas offer a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ alternative, the lesser of two evils technique is a specific type of false dilemma that offers two ‘bad’ alternatives. This technique is often used when the propagandist is trying to convince people to adopt a perspective they will be hesitant to accept. In order to make the choice more appealing, an even worse alternative is presented as being the only other option. It is argued that an imperfect option is, at any rate, better than the horrendous alternative ... In nations such as the United States, which has a de facto two-party system, the lesser of two evils argument is often used as a selling point for politicians. For example, a candidate who is unpopular within his or her party may suddenly appear more attractive when pitted against a member of the opposing party ... While there are many flaws in the lesser-of-two-evils approach, the main problem is that, like the false dilemma, it usually ignores many alternative possibilities ... When you’re faced with such a choice, consider each option on its own merits, and keep in mind that there are probably other, undisclosed alternatives.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Magedah E. Shabo, <i>Techniques of Propaganda & Persuasion</i>, 2008</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>58.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump — though perhaps just a little nicer.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/05/a-person-you-flee-at-parties">- David Bentley Hart, “A Person You Flee at Parties,” <i>First Things</i>, May 6, 2011</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>59.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Like demagoguery and regardless of its appeal to the ‘united body’ of the people, populism is a movement that relies upon the cunning usage of words and the media in order to make the many converge toward politics that are not necessarily in their interests. Polarization is indeed for the sake of a new unification of the people, and is a strategy the few use to claim and acquire more power in order to achieve some results that an open, pluralist, and long deliberation would not allow. Clearly, populist policies are not merely the product of procedural majority. A more intense and large majority is needed and claimed. The people’s collectivity as a homogenous whole, rather than an ex post result of counting of votes, seems to be, since Aristotle, one of the signs of a disfigured democracy, a democracy that is prone to host a demagogic leadership.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Nadia Urbinati, <i>Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People</i>, 2014</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>60.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3043861/Claim-Hillary-Clinton-t-satisfy-husband-winds-Donald-Trump-s-Twitter-account-staffer-retweets-it.html">Donald Trump, Twitter, April 16, 2015</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>61.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Polarization also increases opportunities for demagoguery within American politics. Ideological voters want to frame every issue as a matter of principle, scrutinize every candidate for deviation, tend to look for politicians who ‘tell it like it is,’ and are willing to attack ‘the establishment.’ Fiery language framed in sound bites, which convey coded messages that tap into voter discontent about serious and complicated issues, will find appeal among informed ideological voters, as well as among less well-informed voters who share anxieties and hostility to politics-as-usual. A thin line separates campaign rhetoric from demagoguery. Good campaign rhetoric shall appeal to the head and the heart; demagoguery appeals only to base passions.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- Donald T. Critchlow, <i>Future Right: Forging a New Republican Majority</i>, 2016</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>62.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“It is not within the presidency’s capabilities to turn back the rushing tide of support for socially liberal positions. Besides, that tide first began to crest some time ago in an America that looked very different but embraced underlying principles that made the current regime inevitable. So even if we grant the idea that one should simply support bad Republican candidates in presidential elections, that argument quickly falls apart under any level of serious scrutiny. That said, what is interesting about this conversation is less the naïveté of Trump supporters and more the underlying assumption that Christians have some sort of obligation to vote for someone in national elections and that the failure to do so is nihilistic or an abdication of our responsibility as citizens. More than anything else, this tells us a great deal about the malnourished imaginations of social conservatives in the United States. To elevate voting in presidential elections to the defining act of social responsibility — and to imply that we have an obligation to vote for Falstaffs in said elections — is to actually adopt the sort of centralizing, technocratic mentality that is in fact responsible for many of the problems we are currently facing ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This is not to say we must adopt some sort of Anabaptist quietism and largely withdraw from civil society. Rather, it is to say that we must define civic responsibility in terms that are recognizably Christian rather than Belburian. We must once again recognize that the beginning of a Christian citizen’s responsibility is not to participate in the increasingly farcical process of selecting the head of the executive branch of our national government but is rather the Christian home ... If we are to actually see meaningful reform in our nation it will not come through sending one of our own guys down to Mordor to change the wall decorations of Barad Dur, but rather through reenchanting our homes and making them places of laughter and joy where the love of God is made manifest and the life of faith is made more plausible. Beyond that, there are many other far more immediate arenas of responsibility for the Christian citizen — their local church congregation, neighborhood, schools, and city government all come to mind. If you want to make the case that voting is a Christian responsibility, there may be a persuasive one to be made, but if that is the case then that responsibility is far more apparent with local elections than it is for national ... America’s problem cannot be reduced down to who holds a single office. It is much broader and more pervasive than that. And far from resolving the problem, the evangelical willingness to elect men as power-hungry and shameless as Trump only highlights how pervasive the problem really is.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/is-not-voting-in-an-election-nihilistic/">Jake Meador, “Is Not Voting in an Election Nihilistic?”, <i>Mere Orthodoxy</i>, January 14, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>63.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Trump’s candidacy, it has exposed not just that tragic ramifications of that betrayal of the transformation of our country, but too, he has exposed the complicity on both sides of the aisle that has enabled it, okay? Well, Trump, what he’s been able to do, which is really ticking people off, which I’m glad about, he’s going rogue left and right, man, that’s why he’s doing so well ... </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">His candidacy, which is a movement, it’s a force, it’s a strategy. It proves, as long as the politicos, they get to keep their titles, and their perks, and their media ratings, they don’t really care who wins elections. Believe me on this ... And now, some of them even whispering, they’re ready to throw in for Hillary over Trump because they can’t afford to see the status quo go, otherwise, they won’t be able to be slurping off the gravy train that’s been feeding them all these years. They don’t want that to end. Well, and then, funny, ha ha, not funny, but now, what they’re doing is wailing, ‘well, Trump and his, uh, uh, uh, Trumpeters, they’re not conservative enough.’ Oh my goodness gracious. What the heck would the establishment know about conservatism?”</span></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?403457-1/sarah-palin-endorsement-donald-trump">Sarah Palin, Speech Endorsing Trump in Iowa, January 19, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>64.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“He doesn’t know the Constitution, history, law, political philosophy, nuclear strategy, diplomacy, defense, economics beyond real estate, or even, despite his low-level-mafioso comportment, how ordinary people live. But trumping all this is a greater flaw presented as his chief strength. Governing a great nation in parlous times is far more than making ‘deals.’ Compared with the weight of the office he seeks, his deals are microscopic in scale, and as he faced far deeper complexities he would lead the country into continual Russian roulette. If despite his poor judgment he could engage talented advisers, as they presented him with contending and fateful options the buck would stop with a man who simply grasps anything that floats by. Following Obama’s, a Trump presidency would be yet more adventure tourism for a formerly serious republic.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination">Mark Helprin, “Conservatives Against Trump,” <i>National Review</i>, January 21, 2016</a></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>65.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Conservatives incline to take the weakness of our elite institutions as an argument for recovering constitutional principles — and so for limiting the power of those institutions, reversing their centralization of authority, and recovering a vision of American life in which the chief purpose of the federal government is protective and not managerial. Trump, on the contrary, offers himself as the alternative to our weak and foolish leaders, the guarantee of American superiority, and the cure for all that ails our society; and when pressed about how he will succeed in these ways, his answer pretty much amounts to: ‘great management.’ The appeal of Trump’s diagnoses should be instructive to conservatives. But the shallow narcissism of his prescriptions is a warning. American conservatism is an inherently skeptical political outlook. It assumes that no one can be fully trusted with public power and that self-government in a free society demands that we reject the siren song of politics-as-management. A shortage of such skepticism is how we ended up with the problems Trump so bluntly laments. Repeating that mistake is no way to solve these problems. To address them, we need to begin by rejecting what Trump stands for, as much as what he stands against.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination">Yuval Levin, “Conservatives Against Trump,” <i>National Review</i>, January 21, 2016</a></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>66.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Trump’s supposed pro-life conversion is rooted in Nietzschean, social-Darwinist terms. He knew a child who was to be aborted who grew up to be a “superstar.” Beyond that, Trump’s vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled, and others ought to concern anyone who believes that all persons, not just the “winners” of the moment, are created in God’s image. One also cannot help but look at the personal life of the billionaire. It is not just that he has abandoned one wife after another for a younger woman, or that he has boasted about having sex with some of the “top women of the world.” It’s that he says, after all that, that he has no need to seek forgiveness. At the same time, Trump has made millions off a casino industry that, as social conservatives have rightly argued, not only exploits personal vice but destroys families ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">One may say that Trump’s personal life and business dealings are irrelevant to his candidacy, but conservatives have argued for generations that virtue matters, in the citizenry and in the nation’s leaders. Can conservatives really believe that, if elected, Trump would care about protecting the family’s place in society when his own life is — unapologetically — what conservatives used to recognize as decadent? … Trump can win only in the sort of celebrity-focused mobocracy that Neil Postman warned us about years ago, in which sound moral judgments are displaced by a narcissistic pursuit of power combined with promises of ‘winning’ for the masses. Social and religious conservatives have always seen this tendency as decadent and deviant. For them to view it any other way now would be for them to lose their soul.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination">Russell Moore, “Conservatives Against Trump,” <i>National Review</i>, January 21, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>67.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/23/politics/donald-trump-shoot-somebody-support/">Donald Trump, Iowa Campaign Rally, January 23, 2016</a></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>68.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. If you see somebody getting read to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell - I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1248837/Donald-Trump-hitting-protesters-pay-legal-fees.html">Donald Trump, Iowa Campaign Rally, February 1, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>69.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Obama was, in his way, the sunnier version of the ambitious demagogue whom the founders feared, and against whose election they — and Van Buren — sought to safeguard the country through complex screening and constraining mechanisms. As president, he has turned, in his frustration at the loss of his party’s control of Congress, to ambitious overreaching in his use of executive power. His argument is never that the Constitution authorizes his latest gambit (he leaves that unhappy task to his beleaguered lawyers in the courts), but that he has an electoral mandate to act that a recalcitrant Congress cannot be permitted to obstruct—sounding like a kind of Wilsonian presidential id. With Donald Trump, however, we encounter a much darker id, somehow both anarchic and dictatorial all at once. He has no eloquence, only outbursts; no ideology, only ambition; no plans and white papers, only wild improvisations. If he is nominated, he bids fair to destroy one of our country’s two major parties. If he is elected, he will probably only destroy himself, if we are lucky. Time to reread Plato and Aristotle on democracy. Time to reacquaint ourselves with the founders’ careful thinking on the constitutional constraint of ambition.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/02/16498/">Matthew J. Franck, “Presidential Elections, Party Establishments, and Demagogues,” <i>Public Discourse</i>, February 22, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>70.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Politicians have, since ancient Greece, lied, pandered, and whored. They have taken bribes, connived, and perjured themselves. But in recent times—in the United States, at any rate—there has never been any politician quite as openly debased and debauched as Donald Trump. Truman and Nixon could be vulgar, but they kept the cuss words for private use. Presidents have chewed out journalists, but which of them would have suggested that an elegant and intelligent woman asking a reasonable question was dripping menstrual blood? LBJ, Kennedy, and Clinton could all treat women as commodities to be used for their pleasure, but none went on the radio with the likes of Howard Stern to discuss the women they had bedded and the finer points of their anatomies. All politicians like the sound of their own names, but can anyone doubt what Trump would have christened the Hoover Dam—or the Washington Monument? That otherwise sober people do not find Trump’s insults and insane demands outrageous (Mexico will have to pay for a wall! Japan will have to pay for protection!) says something about a larger moral and cultural collapse. His language is the language of the comments sections of once-great newspapers. Their editors know that the online versions of their publications attract the vicious, the bigoted, and the foulmouthed. But they keep those comments sections going in the hope of getting eyeballs on the page ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">The rot is cultural. It is no coincidence that Trump was the star of a ‘reality’ show. He is the beneficiary of an amoral celebrity culture devoid of all content save an omnipresent lubriciousness. He is a kind of male Kim Kardashian, and about as politically serious. In the context of culture, if not (yet) politics, he is unremarkable; the daily entertainments of today are both tawdry and self-consciously, corrosively ironic. Ours is an age when young people have become used to getting news, of a sort, from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, when an earlier generation watched Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. It is the difference between giggling with young, sneering hipsters and listening to serious adults ... American culture is, in short, nastier, more nihilistic, and far less inhibited than ever before. It breeds alternating bouts of cynicism and hysteria, and now it has given us Trump. The Republican Party as we know it may die of Trump. If it does, it will have succumbed in part because many of its leaders chose not to fight for the Party of Lincoln, which is a set of ideas about how to govern a country, rather than an organization clawing for political and personal advantage. What is at stake, however, is something much more precious than even a great political party. To an extent unimaginable for a very long time, the moral keel of free government is showing cracks. It is not easy to discern how we shall mend them.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/02/26/the-age-of-trump/">Eliot A. Cohen, “The Age of Trump: At Stake is Something Far More Precious Than the Future of the Republican Party,” <i>The American Interest</i>, February 26, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>71.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The reduction of politics to power and the assertion that argument is a cover for bigotry finds its completion in the devil-may-care spectacle that is the Trump campaign. He has persuaded even those who claim for themselves the name of the Gospel that nothing matters besides being told the warm and comforting truth that We Can Be Winners, that the truth is dispensable provided our needs are satisfactorily met. The irrelevancy of truth for the sake of power-relations in Trump’s campaign has transposed ‘political correctness’ into a new, contrarian key: Trump has not left it behind so much as co-opted it for his ends–at least until its purpose is served. And those who support Trump will be most likely to lose out if he eventually wins. So it has often been for those who have bought into his lies. From Trump’s casinos to Trump University, like the prosperity preachers he emulates Trump has preyed upon the very people he claims to love and support. And why would a President Trump be any different? We have been given no reason why the Newly Converted Conservative Trump will be any better for America than the liberal Hillary Clinton. And no reason can be given because none exists outside of Trump’s most solemn word, a word that his history suggests is as valuable as the degrees from his University. For those drawn to Trump’s policies, on what reasonable basis would you expect him to not sell you out? Because the fearsome power of the Republican Establishment will hold him to account? The same Republican establishment that is now bending to kiss the ring? ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">There is no conservative argument for Trump. Conservatives once held that virtue and character are essential requirements for a just society, and that a stable marriage and family is among the best way to nurture those virtues. Those virtues, we contended, were essential for ensuring that the market not only operated efficiently, but stayed within its appropriate boundaries. The conservative movement once believed that religion was central to our social fabric, that not everyone had to be religious but that it needed to be afforded due respect and even reverence. Turning religion into a political prop would only cheapen it, and eventually corrode it. The political virtues that conservatives once cared about — temperance and restraint — are now treated (by ‘conservatives’) as the stuff of compromisers and weaklings: ‘Damn your concern for principles and prudence: We shall have our riots in the streets!’ ... It would be easy to look upon Trump and see him as an outlier in American life. But the Trumpian disregard for the truth and virtue is a cancer that has beset us all: Trump is a candidate for our time, a fitting judgment upon us who magnifies our sins and our vices. He may be a caricature; but he is a parody of us, a morality tale whose meaning we should heed. But there is a difference between acknowledging the degraded political character of our age and joining with the Visigoths while they tear down the Roman monuments.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/against-donald-trump-evangelicals/">Matthew Lee Anderson, “Against Donald Trump: Why Evangelicals Must Not Support Trump,” <i>Mere Orthodoxy</i>, February 29, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>72.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. His campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility. He promised to order U.S. military personnel to torture terrorist suspects and to kill terrorists’ families — actions condemned by the Church and policies that would bring shame upon our country. And there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">We understand that many good people, including Catholics, have been attracted to the Trump campaign because the candidate speaks to issues of legitimate and genuine concern: wage stagnation, grossly incompetent governance, profligate governmental spending, the breakdown of immigration law, inept foreign policy, stifling ‘political correctness’ — for starters. There are indeed many reasons to be concerned about the future of our country, and to be angry at political leaders and other elites. We urge our fellow Catholics and all our fellow citizens to consider, however, that there are candidates for the Republican nomination who are far more likely than Mr. Trump to address these concerns, and who do not exhibit his vulgarity, oafishness, shocking ignorance, and — we do not hesitate to use the word — demagoguery. Mr. Trump’s record and his campaign show us no promise of greatness; they promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432437/donald-trump-catholic-opposition-statement">Robert P. George & George Weigel, “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics,” <i>National Review</i>, March 7, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>73.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Interviewer: “There are dire foreign policy issues percolating around the world right now. Who are you consulting with consistently so that you are ready on day one?</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Donald Trump: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things ... I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people. I talk to a lot of people and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are. But my primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/17/donald-trump-i-consult-myself-on-foreign-policy-be/">MSNBC Interview, March 16, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>74.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"Governing ourselves was never meant to be easy. This has always been a tough business. And when passions flair, ugliness is sometimes inevitable. But we shouldn't accept ugliness as the norm. We should demand better from ourselves and from one another ... With so much at stake, the American people deserve a clear picture of what we believe. Personalities come and go, but principles endure. Ideas endure ... That's the thing about politics. We think of it in terms of this vote or that election. But it can be so much more than that. Politics can be a battle of ideas, not insults."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TneqwiyjztM">Paul Ryan, "On the State of American Politics," March 23, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>75.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"Politically, Trumpism’s antecedents may be found in the presidential campaigns of Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s. Intellectually, Trumpism bears a striking resemblance to the anti-interventionist, anti-globalist, immigration-restrictionist, America First worldview propounded by various paleoconservatives during the 1990s and ever since. It is no accident that Buchanan, for example, is overjoyed by Donald Trump’s candidacy. Instead of venting anger exclusively at left-wing elites, as conservative populism in its Reaganite and tea-party variants has done, the Trumpist brand of populism is simultaneously assailing conservative elites, including the Buckley-Reagan conservative intellectual movement that I described earlier. In particular, Trumpism is deliberately breaking with the conservative internationalism of the Cold War era and with the pro-free-trade, supply-side-economics orthodoxy that has dominated Republican policymaking since 1980 … </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">It is a remarkable development, one that has now led to what can only be described as a struggle for the mind and soul of American conservatism. In these stormy circumstances, it would be foolish to prophesy the outcome. Suffice it to say that in all my years as a historian of conservatism, I have never observed as much dissension on the Right as there is at present. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Now, some may see in this cacophony a sign of vitality, and perhaps it will turn out to be so. But conservatives, more than ever, need minds as well as voices. In this season of discontent, it might be useful for conservatives to step back for a moment and ask a simple question: What do conservatives want? What should they want? Perhaps by getting back to basics, conservative intellectuals can restore some clarity and direction to the debate. What do today’s conservatives want? To put it in elementary terms, I would say that they want what nearly all conservatives since 1945 have wanted: They want to be free, they want to live virtuous and meaningful lives, and they want to be secure from threats both beyond and within our borders. They want to live in a society whose government respects and encourages these aspirations while otherwise leaving people alone. Freedom, virtue, and safety: goals reflected in the libertarian, traditionalist, and national-security dimensions of the conservative movement as it has developed over the past 70 years. In other words, there is at least a little fusionism in nearly all of us. It might be something to build on. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">For three generations now, conservatives have committed themselves to defending the intellectual and spiritual foundations of Western civilization: the resources needed for a free and humane existence. Conservatives know that we all start out in life as “rough beasts” who need to be educated for liberty if we are to secure its blessings. Elections come and go, but this larger work goes on. However events unfold politically in the coming turbulent months, let conservatives remember their heritage and rededicate themselves to their mission.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434548/conservative-intellectuals-george-nash">George H. Nash, “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Then and Now,” <i>National Review</i>, April 26, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>76.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Even though Trump is not explicitly talking about European Americans, he’s implicitly talking about the importance of European Americans ... I think we have to make sure that Trump understands that we expect him to follow through on these things and we expect him to be, you know, our white knight, our advocate, our person ... The Trump candidacy has truly been a referendum on nationalism. It has been a referendum on the controlled establishment, both the media and the political establishment in America. So far Trump has whipped them. He has had the enmity, the hatred, the attacks of the true enemies of not only the Republic, but the European American people ... I think that like so often happens, Jewish chutzpah knows no bounds. These Jewish extremists have made a terribly crazy miscalculation because all they’re really going to be doing by doing the ‘never Trump’ movement is exposing their alien, anti-American majority position to all the Republicans.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://mediaarchives.gsradio.net/dduke/050416.mp3">David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, May 3, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>77.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“This really shouldn’t be that hard. The oath I took is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. In brief, that means I’m for limited government. And there is no reason to believe that either of these two national frontrunners believe in limiting anything about DC’s power. I believe that most Americans can still be for limited government again -- if they were given a winsome candidate who wanted Washington to focus on a small number of really important, urgent things -- in a way that tried to bring people together instead of driving us apart. I think there is room – an appetite – for such a candidate. What am I missing?”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sassefornebraska/posts/593031420862025">Senator Ben Sasse, “An Open Letter to Majority America,” May 4, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>78.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Donald J. Trump and Patrick J. Buchanan have a few things in common: Both are foreign-policy isolationists. Both oppose free-trade deals. Both want to shut the southern border. Both have shown contempt for women. Both advance a white nationalist view of their ideal America. And each has wreaked havoc on the Republican Party ... Speaking on Morning Edition, Buchanan ... explained his endorsement of Trump, which he made despite Trump’s many right-wing apostasies. It boiled down to this: The United States, in Buchanan’s view, is facing an existential threat from the non-white peoples of the world, whether through bad trade deals or the growing presence of non-European immigrants within our borders. ‘So, we’re, what, about 25 years away from the fact when Americans of European descent will be a minority in the United States ... Anybody that believes that a country can be maintained that has no ethnic core to it ... I believe he is naive in the extreme,’ Buchanan told NPR.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://prospect.org/article/white-supremacy-and-trumps-battle-soul-america">Adele M Stan, “White Supremacy and Trump’s Battle for the ‘Soul of America’: The Presumptive GOP Nominee Is Reviving Patrick Buchanan’s Legacy of Bigotry,” <i>The American Prospect</i>, May 6, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>79.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The things conservatives are telling themselves to justify supporting him —at least he might appoint good judges — miss this long-term point. The Reagan coalition might — might! — get an acceptable Supreme Court appointment out of the Trump presidency. But that could easily be the last thing it ever got … But there still remains the problem of Trump himself. Even if you find things to appreciate in Trumpism — as I have, and still do — the man who has raised those issues is still unfit for an office as awesomely powerful as the presidency of the United States. His unfitness starts with basic issues of temperament. It encompasses the race-baiting, the conspiracy theorizing, the flirtations with violence, and the pathological lying that have been his campaign-trail stock in trade. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">But above all it is Trump’s authoritarianism that makes him unfit for the presidency — his stated admiration for Putin and the Chinese Politburo, his promise to use the power of the presidency against private enterprises, the casual threats he and his surrogates toss off against party donors, military officers, the press, the speaker of the House, and more. All presidents are tempted by the powers of the office, and congressional abdication has only increased that temptation’s pull. President Obama’s power grabs are part of a bipartisan pattern of Caesarism, one that will likely continue apace under Hillary Clinton. But far more than Obama or Hillary or George W. Bush, Trump is actively campaigning as a Caesarist, making his contempt for constitutional norms and political niceties a selling point. And given his mix of proud ignorance and immense self-regard, there is no reason to believe that any of this is just an act. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Trump would not be an American Mussolini; even our sclerotic institutions would resist him more effectively than that. But he could test them as no modern president has tested them before — and with them: the health of our economy, the civil peace of our society and the stability of an increasingly perilous world. In sum: It would be possible to justify support for Trump if he merely promised a period of chaos for conservatism. But to support Trump for the presidency is to invite chaos upon the republic and the world. No policy goal, no court appointment, can justify such recklessness.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/the-conservative-case-against-trump.html">Ross Douthat, “The Conservative Case Against Trump,” <i>The New York Times</i>, May 7, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>80.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“What ails us is a disordered view of what politics is about. We seem to have a bipartisan problem of looking for a savior in a president — it’s the stuff both of Barack Obama’s ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’ campaign and of Republicans (and now even some Democrats) idolizing the memory of Ronald Reagan. So take a deep breath, everyone — whomever you do or don’t support this presidential-election season. The presidency is vitally important, of course. But not in the ways we’ve been tending to think. Donald Trump didn’t start the fire, and there was never going to be a perfect presidential candidate who could put it out. That’s our work — the work of good citizenship. So walk away from the TV, stop watching the coverage of every rally, and do something to renew and rebuild our civil society. Right in front of you is where great things can happen. But not if you sit around waiting for Washington to work miracles — which never was its job anyway.</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435132/facing-trump-whats-conservative-do">Kathryn Jean Lopez, “What’s a Conservative to Do?”, <i>National Review</i>, May 9, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>81.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“As for Trump himself: if anything is more ludicrous than the Republican Party it’s the idea that Trump can be relied upon to nominate a solid conservative to the Supreme Court. He is more likely to nominate his daughter. Or Corey Lewandowski. Or Bill Clinton. Or Incitatus. There are no — zero — positions held by conservatives of any stripe, from the neo to the paleo to the social, that Trump could be counted on to implement or support. Nor do I even think that the leaders of the GOP believe he can be relied on. Each of them is merely feeding the crocodile in hopes that it will eat him last ... We all know what Trump is: so complete a narcissist that the concepts of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are alien to him. He knows only the lust for power and the rage of being thwarted in his lust. In a sane society the highest position to which he could aspire is apprentice dogcatcher, and then only if no other candidates presented themselves ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I would but whisper, ‘Goodbye cruel world.’ But if my family somehow managed to convince me to stick around, in preference to Trump I would vote for Hillary. Or John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. In preference to Trump I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Adlai Stevenson, or for that matter that of Julius Caesar, who perhaps has learned a thing or two in his two thousand years of afterlife. The only living person that I would readily choose Trump in preference to is Charles Manson.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/my-carefully-considered-views-on-the-upcoming-presidential-election/">Alan Jacobs, “My Carefully Considered Views on the Upcoming Presidential Election,” <i>The American Conservative</i>, June 2, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>82.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“We see nurtured in [Trump’s] campaign an incipient proto-fascism anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary. The prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber-rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtnXbL2wwdM">Ken Burns, "2016 Stanford Commencement Address," June 12, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>83.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Over the years, I’ve worked closely with many of the hundreds of faith leaders who trekked to Trump Tower on Tuesday to meet with presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump. I’ve opposed Trump, and wasn’t invited. But even if I had been, I wouldn’t have gone. I believe these pilgrims meant well, but I think their judgment about associating with Trump is troubling and unwise. In embracing this brazen man — whether tacitly or overtly — they appear to have forgotten the very premises on which the Moral Majority and the social conservative movement was founded. His candidacy is the antithesis of everything we set out to achieve ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Trump most clearly fails the traditional standard championed by the Christian right on the subject of personal character ... The leaders in attendance at Trump’s event know the Bible. It says we are to love God first and then our neighbor. (Matthew 22:37-39) Yet they seemingly ignore the childish ridicule that Trump heaps on many of our neighbors: the disabled, Hispanics and women just for starters. The Bible says a leader should not consider himself better than his brothers. But Trump’s arrogance — he said at one point that he’s ‘the most successful person ever to run for the presidency’ — is the stuff of legend, and not the hallmark of a godly individual. He’s not seen as a man of his word — hundreds of vendors report that his companies have stiffed them after services were rendered. He has dragged our political discourse into the gutter. Even an implicit endorsement of Trump stains the character of the endorser more than it elevates Trump’s standing ... Now, we’re being asked to give up our character and just vote Republican. That may be the choice of many voters, but it’s not why evangelicals like me got involved in politics. I, for one, won’t do it. Neither candidate qualifies as the lesser of the two evils.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/23/i-helped-start-the-moral-majority-trump-is-the-opposite-of-what-we-wanted/?utm_term=.f4d328b942fc">Michael Farris, “I helped start the Moral Majority. Trump is the opposite of what we wanted,” <i>The Washington Post</i>, June 23, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>84.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Our public square is plagued by habitual, brazen lying. This isn’t entirely new — there have always been some politicians who lied — but I do not believe this country can long survive if the public concedes in advance that people in government do not need to be consistently aiming to tell the truth. In other words, it’s one thing to elect someone who ends up lying to us after the fact. (That’s terrible.) But it’s another thing entirely to conclude in advance that they are both liars, and simply shrug and elect them anyway. That does something to the national soul that tears at the fabric of who we are. By the way, this is a good time to say that if you really think one of the two presidential frontrunners is genuinely trustworthy, then fine, you should vote and sleep soundly. Sadly, I do not regard either of them as worthy of our trust. This matters a great deal, because before I can vote for someone, a minimum-bar prerequisite is that I must believe that, on January 20, 2017, he or she would be taking the oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” and actually mean it. Today, I do not have this confidence about either of the current frontrunners. I think one of them does not even know what the Constitution is about, and the other doesn’t care.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://medium.com/@BenSasse/two-kinds-of-voting-two-kinds-of-disruption-and-two-kinds-of-unrighteousness-fd26895aa01f#.akwkhlqc1">Senator Ben Sasse, “Two Kinds of Voting, Two Kinds of Disruption, and Two Kinds of Unrighteousness,” July 11, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>85.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“The nominee of the Republican Party sets unprecedented standards for incompetence, inexperience, self-absorption, and delusional levels of self-confidence that defy clinical descriptions of narcissism. No presidential nominee of a major party has ever failed to serve in any public office, elected or appointed, civilian or military. No nominee has devoted his entire public life so completely to self-aggrandizement and self-promotion without even an inkling of civic responsibility. No nominee … has displayed such nonchalant disdain for the complicated domestic and foreign policy problems facing the nation.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/historiansondonaldtrump/">Joseph J. Ellis, "Historians on Trump," July 11, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>86.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“So much that Donald Trump spouts is so vulgar and so far from the truth and mean-spirited. It is on that question of character especially that he does not measure up. He is unwise. He is plainly unprepared, unqualified and, it often seems, unhinged. How can we possibly put our future in the hands of such a man? ... Why would we ever choose to entrust our highest office, and our future, to someone so clearly unsuited for the job?”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/historiansondonaldtrump/">David McCullough, "Historians on Trump," July 12, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>87.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“I’m disturbed by the words missing from the Trump campaign: Liberty, justice, freedom and tolerance. The only historical movement that Trump alludes to is a shameful one: America First.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/historiansondonaldtrump/">Ron Chernow, "Historians on Trump," July 12, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>88.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“But as far as his worldview, Trump’s worldview, you know, I was debating an evangelical professor on NPR and this professor said, ‘Pastor, don’t you want a candidate who embodies the teaching of Jesus and would govern this country according to the principles found in the Sermon on the Mount?’ I said, ‘Heck no.’ I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation ... I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that’s Biblical.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.mikeonline.com/dr-robertjeffress-peter_wehner-join-mike-for-an-important-debate-over-evangelical-christians-support-of-trump/">Robert Jeffress, Pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, The Mike Gallagher Show, July 12, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>89.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“God came to me in a dream last night and showed me the future. He took me to heaven and I saw Donald Trump seated at the right hand of our Lord.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.gopocalypse.org/evangelical-leaders-now-consider-trump-a-better-choice-than-jesus-no-this-is-not-satire/">Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, July 13, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>90.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“I feel no enthusiasm at the prospect of a Clinton presidency. She has already been pushed alarmingly far to the left of Barack Obama by Bernie Sanders’ challenge. Her reputation for honesty and judgment is in … well, whatever comes below tatters. Yet the alternative seems even worse. I do not share the view that a Trump presidency would be tyranny, undermining the Constitution and eroding the liberties it enshrines. The Constitution was carefully designed to cope with the tendency of democratic electorates to fall for demagogues. But what it cannot do is protect us from terrible policies. Drastic restrictions on immigration, protectionist tariffs, reckless taxing and borrowing — we have seen all these things before in American history, we have seen their unintended costs, and we could see them again if Trump is elected.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/07/18/from-trollope-trump/gLkfvfFWqqRiz4zRRRKMTN/story.html">Niall Ferguson, “From Trollope to Trump,” <i>The Boston Globe</i>, July 18, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>91.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Ideas matter, and supporting Trump means advancing ideas I find not just wrong, but destructive. I’ve defended the unborn my entire career; he praises Planned Parenthood. I believe that marriage is a sacred covenant between husband and wife; he’s a serial adulterer. I believe America should lead the world in defense not just of its territorial integrity but also of civilization itself; he would retreat into glorified isolationism. I believe that free trade has made America more prosperous and enriched the lives of its citizens; he threatens to start ruinous economic conflicts. I believe that a core American value is that we can and must judge our citizens by the content of their character, not the color of their skin or their families’ roots; he attacks a federal judge because of his parents’ Mexican heritage. So Trump has profound differences not just with me but with Americans like me. And we’re not willing to lift a single finger — not even in the voting booth — to advance his ideas, even if his opponent’s ideas are also repugnant ... </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Character matters, too, and supporting Trump means elevating a man of low morals, which is the last thing our nation needs. I believe men should strive to be honest; Trump lies habitually. I believe men should treat women with respect; he mocks any woman who opposes him or challenges him. I believe in treating opponents fairly; he calls them names and spreads the most vile rumors about their families. I believe that public officials should be intellectually curious, striving to know more about the world; Trump is aggressively ignorant, paying far more attention to poll numbers and press clippings than to the issues he’d confront in the Oval Office … To the open-minded, how credible is a message of life, individual liberty, free markets, and limited government coming from erstwhile conservatives who tossed those values overboard for the sake of a single election? How credible is a message that a great nation needs good citizens, [friends, and neighbors, if] coming from the advocates of a known liar? How can anyone resist the continued decadence and degradation of the sexual revolution after casting his lot with a proud philanderer?”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438092/republican-convention-why-never-trump-movement-still-matters">David French, “Never Trump, Now More Than Ever,” <i>National Review</i>, July 20, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>92.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“[Vladimir Putin] is not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not gonna go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/31/politics/donald-trump-russia-ukraine-crimea-putin/">Donald Trump, Interview with ABC, July 31, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>93.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Trump and Clinton supporters want to get as many people to vote for their nominees as possible, and it makes sense to them to pressure friends and audiences, especially if they have voted for their party’s nominee before. People who held their nose and voted for Mitt Romney (such as myself) are prime targets for GOP pressure. If I’ve voted for a lousy party nominee before, I’m likely to cave again, so the Trump-pushers will not relent. The same dynamic is in play on the Democrat side … Exemplifying the ignorance of dissenters’ motivations that prevails among loyalist pundits, a flurry of tweets came out several days ago pronouncing #NeverTrump dead. These opinionators, including Trump himself, haven’t been listening to the NeverTrump camp, but simply assuming that once a candidate has the nomination locked down, the dissenting factions would fall in line and the party will ‘unify’ behind its nominee. But NeverTrump didn’t mean “We’ll never let him become the nominee.” NeverTrump means we will never vote for him, not even in the general election. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The neither vote is an important statement that apparently flies over the heads of these pundits: that neither candidate is fit to be president. This narrow, binary way people … view the election ignores the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that principled voters may think neither candidate has the competence and character necessary for the Oval Office, and as such neither deserves their votes ... My past votes for Republicans do not put me under some special obligation to vote for a candidate I see as unfit for office, or any candidate, for that matter. One could argue Trump isn’t even playing for our “team” (let’s call it Team Pseudo-Conservative). He’s playing for his own, or some new version of the team with a bench that’s becoming more and more hostile to folks like me. So why should I score for him? </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The GOP is not entitled to my vote. The Democrat Party is not entitled to the votes of all Democrats. My vote belongs to me alone, and candidates must earn it. If no candidate earns it (and that includes third-party candidates), I have not been deprived of my political influence. That’s an argument made both to the less politically involved to ‘rock the vote’ and a desperate plea to the Trump or Clinton-hesitant: YOU MUST CHOOSE, and if you do not choose one, then by default you choose the other. Indeed, to pressure into voting those who do not believe a nominee deserves their vote is to inhibit them from expressing their real positions toward the candidates and the democratic process. I, for one, choose to let my silence speak, even if few can hear it.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/01/no-party-owns-my-vote/">Georgi Boorman, "No Party Owns My Vote," <i>The Federalist</i>, August 1, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>94.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are disliked by more voters than any major-party nominees in at least three decades. Independents easily outnumber either Democrats or Republicans. And polls show voters overwhelmingly want another choice. There is no shortage of great leaders in the United States with integrity, strength and vision, but there is something standing in their way: A morass of state laws meant to keep particular Americans from threatening the two existing major parties. Fundamentally, these laws prevent rivals from emerging that might replace the existing non-responsive parties — the way the Republicans emerged to replace the Whigs over the issue of slavery. And like poll taxes and literacy tests, they unjustifiably block ballot access. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Unlike Democrats or Republicans, independents and third parties have to fight their way onto the ballot in all 50 states. That takes money and boots on the ground. But even with both, an independent candidate will meet immediate trouble from state laws and capricious interpretations by local officials who are themselves typically stalwarts of the ruling duopoly. These officials will challenge the signatures on nomination petitions themselves and even the eligibility of those tasked with collecting them. Consider Ralph Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. In Pennsylvania, a lawyer for the Democratic Party successfully invalidated the authenticity of over 30,000 of Nader’s signatures — often for ridiculous reasons like someone signing ‘Bill’ instead of ‘William.’ </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">And early ballot deadlines prevent independent candidates from emerging after it becomes clear that the choices presented by the two major parties are opposed by so many. In Texas, for example, this year’s third-party filing deadline fell before the Democratic and Republican primaries were complete. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Although an independent candidate can try to work around the trouble spots in states with political opposition, such low-level workarounds have not been successful. The next step? Wage a concerted legal battle across the country, arguing that the current process is rigged to protect the two major parties from real competition.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://time.com/4436805/lawrence-lessig-randy-barnett/">Randy E. Barnett & Lawrence Lessig, “The Real Reason You Can’t Vote for an Independent Candidate,” <i>Time Magazine</i>, August 3, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>95.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Hillary wants to abolish – essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html">Donald Trump, North Carolina Campaign Rally, August 9, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>96.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“That’s why I’m just saying the church can’t sit this one out. We may not have a perfect candidate but he may be the one, like the Book of Daniel — the most high God may have lifted up Trump, because very possibly he’s the only one that could defeat Hillary Clinton this fall.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/8785/michele-bachmann-god-raised-trump-joshua-yasmeh">Michelle Bachmann, CBN Interview, August 30, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>97.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“Most Republicans wish they had a different candidate (though those, like me, who will not vote for Trump and consider him simply unfit for the presidency are certainly a modest minority). And it’s already pretty hard to find people making affirmative arguments for him rather than merely explaining they’ll vote Trump because they think they have to vote for one of the two major-party candidates and Hillary is even worse ... Conversations with Trump voters about the prospect of a President Trump generally conclude in the hope that he might be surrounded by people who will restrain his instincts or direct his energies — which isn’t exactly a vote of confidence. It’s hard to ignore the hideous character failings at the core of the man, and for this purpose maybe especially his fundamental infidelity toward all who rely on his word, which makes it hard to take seriously any assurances. He has sometimes shown himself capable of sticking to script or obeying the teleprompter, and when he does that he raises the possibility that he may be containable. But when Trump is given a chance to reveal something of himself, he without fail reveals a terrifying emptiness. The idea that such a man would be improved by being handed immense power simply refuses to be believed. Even wishful thinking supercharged by a justified dread of what a Hillary Clinton administration could do to the American republic can only go so far — certainly far enough not to vote for her, but for this voter not nearly far enough to vote for him. Neither major-party option in this election is worthy of affirmation, and no amount of wishing it were otherwise is likely to change that. All we can do, it seems to me, is hope and work for a Congress able and inclined to counterbalance a dangerous executive.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/439789/final-stretch-yuval-levin">Yuval Levin, “The Final Stretch,” <i>National Review</i>, September 7, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>98.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“I think this will be the last election if I don’t win. I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the borders, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote and once that happens you can forget it. I guarantee you, you’re not going to have one Republican vote.”</span><br />
<span style="color: red; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www1.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2016/09/09/brody-file-exclusive-donald-trump-says-this-will-be-the-last-election-that-the-republicans-have-a-chance-of-winning">Donald Trump, "Interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network," September 9, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>99.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“I wrote about [the ‘Flight 93 Election’ essay in the <i>Claremont Review of Books</i>] earlier in the week, but it says something about my own pessimism that I didn’t notice that it was all that radical. In fact, it sounds like an especially articulate version of what conservatives I know who dislike Trump tell themselves to justify their planned vote for him. I am not one of those people. I don’t at all agree with the writer’s claim that conservatives are obliged to vote for Trump to save the Republic. I’m not voting for Trump (or Clinton) because I see them both as evidence for and agents of our decay ... Vote Trump, or vote Clinton. It won’t make much difference to the kind of things people like me value. Both are deadly, though in somewhat different ways.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/reactionaries-in-our-time/">Rod Dreher, "Reactionaries In Our Time," <i>The American Conservative</i>, September 9, 2016</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>100.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">“[Sean] Hannity could prod the Republican candidate to change his approach, but has not done so, at least in public, where his words would carry weight precisely because he is Trump’s number-one fan on the airwaves. Hannity’s bitter attacks on conservatives who aren’t on board for Trump as damnable losers, on the other hand, seems unlikely to help Trump. If anything, it makes it look as though Trump’s biggest supporters are more interested in establishing who gets blamed for a defeat than they are confident in victory ... But who owns Hannity? Nobody forced conservatives around the country to listen to him. If other conservatives in the media, including those who oppose Trump, thought he was a hack who people should ignore, they – we – did not say so. Maybe we should have.”</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-09/sean-hannity-will-own-a-share-of-any-trump-defeat">Ramesh Ponnuru, “Sean Hannity Will Own a Share of Any Trump Defeat,” <i>Bloomberg View</i>, September 9, 2016</a></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">--</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Speaking of Hannity, let's establish this right now. If you vote for Donald Trump, you are placing yourself in the company of Sean Hannity, and in the company of Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Steve King, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, Herman Cain, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, David Duke, Rocky Suhayda, Thomas DiLorenzo, Bill O’Reilly, Kevin Sorbo, Hulk Hogan, Rex Ryan, Mike Tyson and Phil Robertson. Enjoy yourself there.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you vote for Donald Trump, you are also placing yourself in the dubious religious company of Kirk Cameron, Pat Robertson, Paula White, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Ralph Reed, Richard Land, Wayne Grudem, Ed Young, Kenneth & Gloria Copeland, Mike Murdoch and Gary Bauer. Again ... um, enjoy. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If, on the other hand, you refuse to vote for Donald Trump, you are placing yourself in the stalwart company of Mark Helprin, Wendell Berry, Yuval Levin, Robert P. George, Patrick J. Deneen, George Weigel, Eliot A. Cohen, Robert Kagan, Ben Sasse, David French, David Bentley Hart, Tim Keller, Russell Moore, John Milbank, Thabiti Anyabwile, D.G. Hart, George Will, Kevin D. Williamson, Ross Douthat, Thomas Pfau, Alan Jacobs, Rod Dreher, Michael Farris, Ben Domenech, David Brooks, William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Marilynne Robinson, Ken Burns, David McCullough, Niall Ferguson, George H. Nash, Ron Chernow, David Levering Lewis, Joseph J. Ellis, Ryan T. Anderson, Francis J. Beckwith, Mary Eberstadt, Matthew J. Franck, C.C. Pecknold, Garrison Keillor, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and also, yes, the ghosts of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Russell Kirk.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In fact, we may as well conclude again with Buckley:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>101.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"In the final analysis, just as the king might look down with terminal disdain upon a courtier whose hypocrisy repelled him, so we have no substitute for relying on the voter to exercise a quiet veto when it becomes more necessary to discourage cynical demagogy, than to advance free health for the kids. That can come later, in another venue; the resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority."</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">- </span><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430187/william-f-buckley-donald-trump-demagoguery-cigar-aficionado" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;">William F. Buckley, Jr., <i>Cigar Aficionado</i>, March 2000</a><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In the final analysis, a plurality of voters may have already failed us. But resisting the corrupting Trump/Clinton demagoguery is still a first priority for some of us. We will not cast our votes for Trump or Clinton. We will not support the most arrogant examples of dishonesty and corruption that have ever occupied places as the presidential nominees. We will not expect the American executive branch to help us during the next four years. We will expect the legislative and judicial branches to exercise some of those checks and balances during the next four years.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">After this presidential contest, as Thomas Pfau describes it, between P.T. Barnum and Lady Macbeth, we will not expect national politics to improve, shape, or help our culture. Instead, we will continue to work within our homes, our towns, our cities, and within our arts and culture. We will, in the meantime, focus on living, on personally investing in and building the ties of our local communities - and on educating and encouraging our fellows towards communal enjoyment of life and defending against all enemies of the permanent things.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Hannibal ad portās! Carthago delenda est. Aut cum scuto aut in scuto. Fac fortia et patere. Virtus tentamine gaudet. Viriliter agite estote fortes.</i></span></div>
J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-64346323856399382462014-02-28T17:36:00.000-08:002014-02-28T17:36:23.805-08:00What Ought To Be the Most Important Cultural & Political Issue of the 21st Century: Education<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTK0yLZJhoMcnLjsf4xci3RbEKqQL36NIY9K_pOP2fWBOqVvehhXrn-FtFZWY6dUKC-QF8cJ3E3toHj2OClLDoZZ8yGEpIAH4DGVMfBPrI0RmWImdql8kGg0RrDmRxOEdSFsPQBo1lNI8/s1600/The+Country+School.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTK0yLZJhoMcnLjsf4xci3RbEKqQL36NIY9K_pOP2fWBOqVvehhXrn-FtFZWY6dUKC-QF8cJ3E3toHj2OClLDoZZ8yGEpIAH4DGVMfBPrI0RmWImdql8kGg0RrDmRxOEdSFsPQBo1lNI8/s1600/The+Country+School.jpg" height="352" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>“Verbal SAT scores in the United States took a nosedive in the 1960s, and since then they have remained flat. Despite intense efforts by the schools, reading scores nationwide have remained low.”</i><br />
- E.D. Hirsch, Jr.<br />
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<i>“The ‘Dick and Jane’ and ‘run, Spot, run’ school of letters does not stir the imagination, and it imparts small apprehension of norms. Apologists for this aspect of life-adjustment schooling believe that they are inculcating respect for values by prescribing simple readings that commend tolerant, kindly, co-operative behavior. Yet this is no effective way to impart a knowledge of norms: direct moral didacticism, whether of the Victorian or of the twentieth-century variety, usually awakens resistance in the recipient, particularly if he has some natural intellectual power.”</i><br />
- Russell Kirk</div>
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Reading or watching the news is always a dismal business. Recently, some of the most miserable of news stories have been those informing us of American education. I believe this is true no matter what your political point of view. Even if my own political persuasion were reversed in polarity, I still cannot see how I could rid myself of the growing sense that, in the face of what has really happened to U.S. education, so many of the education news stories that we are given are almost arrogant in their overt triviality.<br />
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<i>Exempli gratia:</i><br />
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<b><a href="http://www.ocregister.com/articles/church-597327-district-school.html">New Item #1:</a></b> One parent, with the support of the <i>Freedom From Religion Foundation</i>, has lodged a complaint with the Los Alamitos Unified School District alleging that combining the graduation ceremonies of two middle schools into a 100,000-square-foot auditorium of a local mega-church (as the District has done for the past two years) is illegal on First Amendment grounds. “By our public school choosing a church or a temple or a mosque or a synagogue, it’s then endorsing that church or mosque or synagogue, regardless of whether there’s a cross,” argues the parent.<br />
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The written complaint cites the Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in a recent decision<i>, Doe v. Elmbrook School District</i>, which ruled that holding a high-school graduation ceremony in a church building is an “Establishment of Religion” because of the building’s “proselytizing environment.” The court explained its reasoning as follows: “Regardless of the purpose of school administrators in choosing the location, the sheer religiosity of the space created a likelihood that high school students and their younger siblings would perceive a link between church and state.”<br />
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Obviously, <i>Doe v. Elmbrook</i> is now headed on its merry way to the Supreme Court. Also, needless to say, given that they used the word “religiosity” to describe the atmosphere within the architectural structure of the average American mega-church, we can safely deduce that the honorable members of the Seventh Circuit have not personally bothered to venture inside one of these buildings in the last decade or so.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/creationism_in_texas_public_schools_undermining_the_charter_movement.single.html">News Item #2:</a></b> Charter schools have been, or ought to be, a healthy and competitive alternative to state run education. Unfortunately, the textbooks being used by <i>some</i> charter schools are now actually being read. For example, the Biology textbooks being distributed, to more than sixty-five school campuses across three different states, have just been reported upon in <i>Slate</i> magazine. A few quotes from the school workbooks provide examples of the sort of “education” students are being given. These workbooks don't just question the theory of evolution itself. They also challenge things like the age of the earth: “Some scientists even question the validity of the conclusions concerning the age of the Earth.” and “How can scientists do experiments on something that takes millions of years to accomplish? It’s impossible.”<br />
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The history books aren’t much better. A section on World War I describes the cause of the war as an “anti-Christian bias” that arose from the Enlightenment along with “the abandoning of religious standards.” In describing one of the causes of World War II, the book states: “Following World War I, Japan attempted to solve its economic and social problems by military means. The Samurai, a group promoting a military approach to create a vast Japanese empire in Asia, wanted to expand Japan’s influence along the Chinese mainland including many Pacific Islands.” Never mind that the Samurai were wiped from existence in Japan well before World War I ever began.<br />
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According to <i>Slate</i>, the actual History textbook in one Texas charter school is the populist <i>A Patriot’s History of the United States</i> (highly recommended by Glenn Beck) which teaches things like, oh say, how Feminism “created an entirely new class of females who lacked male financial support and who had to turn to the state as a surrogate husband.”<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/14/first-grader-told-to-stop-talking-about-bible/">News Item #3:</a></b> At Helen Hunt-Jackson Elementary School in Temecula, California, a first grade teacher tasked her kids with bringing something the next day from their homes to represent a family tradition and present it to the rest of the class. Six-year-old Brynn Williams brought the star that had been placed at the top of her family’s Christmas tree. When she began to describe how the star was “the Star of Bethlehem” the first grade teacher told her to stop right there, to be quiet and go sit down. The teacher then told this six-year-old that she was not allowed to talk about the Bible in school.<br />
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The usual and predictable noise of culture war ensued. Outraged parents complained to the principal. The principal explained to the parents that the teacher was right because the school’s rules were designed to protect other six-year-olds from “being offended” by a presentation of anything religious. <i>Fox News</i> quickly and humorlessly picked up the story and blew it beyond any sense of proportion. Then, the number of people on both sides who suddenly became “offended” increased exponentially.<br />
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The manner in which this story was reported is telling. No one excused the first grade teacher as having made a stupid mistake by being overly anal, instead she had to be (a) properly following a school policy that allegedly makes it <i>Verboten!</i> for six-year-olds to utter the phrase “star of Bethlehem”, or she was (b) deliberately attacking Christianity and the very foundations of this great nation. No news reporter questioned the assumption that a six-year-old would be subtle enough to slip in a proselyting brain-washing gospel message behind her show-and-tell on why a bit of tin foil was stuck at the top of a tree. No news reporter questioned the assumption that the other six-year-olds in the class would be sophisticated enough to notice and to be appropriately offended by such an obvious violation of separation of church and state. No news reporter questioned the assumption that this was a story worth reporting as ... news.<br />
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<b><a href="http://ncse.com/news/2014/01/antievolution-legislation-missouri-0015308">News Item #4:</a></b> On January 16, 2013, House Bill 1472 was introduced to the Missouri House of Representatives. The language of the bill would require that all schools (public or charter) giving any “instruction relating to the theory of evolution” notify parents and allow parents the option of withdrawing their students from class whenever the aforesaid class would be teaching about evolution.<br />
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The sponsors of HB 1472 are trying a new angle of attack here. Their past efforts at legislating “equal time” for the teaching of “intelligent design” in Biology classes have failed. Virginia and Oklahoma both currently have similar bills before their own state houses.<br />
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If you follow education news regularly, you will already know that the teaching of evolution is still one of the hottest stories about our schools. Anyone who thought that H.L. Mencken said what needed to be said in 1925 on the subject was overly-optimistic. Rules, regulations and legislation is still regularly being proposed, fought over, passed, violated, enforced, appealed, overruled, modified, rejected and amended over whether school science teachers and books are allowed to, or must be forced to, print or utter words like “theory” or “generally accepted.”<br />
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If a foreigner tried to gauge what the biggest problem in American schools happened to be by sheer number of news stories over the years, the teaching of evolution and/or intelligent design would most likely be it.<br />
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<a href="http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20140224/NEWS01/140229585/Dispute-over-test-scores-puts-federal-education-funds-at-risk-"><b>New Item #5:</b></a> Highlighting the difficulties with standardized federal test scores, the state of Washington’s waiver from the requirements of the <i>No Child Left Behind</i> law is about to expire. <i>No Child Left Behind</i> required that federal funds be specifically allocated, between school districts and remedial programs, based on student test scores. (The idea was to have every child at reading and math levels appropriate to their own grades, measured, of course, by standardized test scores.) Washington’s state law does not currently comply with these requirements, which means that either (a) the state of Washington change its law, (b) the federal waiver already granted to Washington (once in 2011 and then again in 2013) be extended for a third time, or (c) the federal government begins mandating how the state spends allocated federal funds.<br />
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Apparently, Washington’s school “evaluation system” is only one year old. State legislators want student test scores <i>to be able to be used</i> in evaluating teacher performance and they crafted their “new” evaluation system accordingly. The U.S. Department of Education argues that <i>No Child Left Behind</i> mandates that student test scores <i>be used</i> to evaluate teacher performance. State Senator, Steve Litzow, sponsored a bill modifying the evaluation system to make it comply with federal requirements. Litzow said that he took out all the controversial language that he could from the bill so that the only difference between his bill and current state law was changing “can to must.” His bill was rejected by the state legislature. Senator Rosemary McAuliffe voted against it even though she had drafted similar legislation in January. She explained that she changed her mind because standardized student test scores are only “dipsticks in time.” “Our teachers and principals have built a very strong evaluation system,” McAuliffe declared. “We need to quit changing it every year.”<br />
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Sadly for the entire state of Washington, if the federal waiver is not extended again by August, almost every Washington school will be required to send a letter to the parents of its students informing them that their school is failing according to federal standards. The state of Washington would then be required to allocate federal funds to “off-campus tutoring programs for low-performing students.” In his statement after a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of Education in order to obtain another waiver, Governor Jay Inslee declared: “there’s a possibility to develop a positive path forward that has a realistic chance of success.”<br />
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It is not a good sign that, when education is discussed and debated in the public square, <i>these</i> are the issues that attract the most attention. Anyone who reads today’s education news should be able to see that there is a more important underlying problem. In spite of how evolution is taught, in spite of whether casual religious asides are allowed or prohibited inside the classroom, in spite of the growing number of charter schools, and in spite of how much the federal government increases its education spending or even how strictly it attempts to enforce its most recently standardized test scores, the results of our current education system are still growing more and more abysmal.<br />
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<b>The Current Failure of the U.S. Education System</b><br />
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Tactfully put, there were two major trends in American education in the Twentieth Century: (a) the progressive lowering of academic standards, for teacher training, university admission, and various bare minimum test scores, which then also concurrently developed along with (b) the steady plummeting of American students' test scores and literacy rates. Bluntly put, Americans have been growing stupider and stupider over the last hundred years as the teaching in our schools has been increasingly dumbed down, and then dumbed down again, and then again, and etc. (I do not make this claim out of condescension. I include myself as one of the stupider Americans. My own education and literacy is a joke compared to the education and literacy of any socially equivalent American of a century or more ago.)<br />
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The evidence is overwhelming and it has been noticed throughout the West, outside as well as inside the United States. “Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted,” asked Dorothy Sayers in 1947, “by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee meetings and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees?” That the corroded quality of public discourse was noted in England in 1947 is almost laughable to us now, particularly to those of us who would give limbs for the kind of sophistication and intelligence that recordings and transcripts of public discourse from the 1940s so clearly evidence. But that is only by comparison to the bloated, blinkered, narrow and lumbering “discourse” that we are now treated to. Sayers continued by asking: “And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?” I doubt Ms. Sayers could have ever guessed the level to which such a heart could sink to over seven decades later. Sayers also attributed, and I believe rightly, the level of discourse in the public square to the level of education <i>of </i>that public square’s civil society.<br />
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In 1969, Russell Kirk reflected that a culture will always evidence the quality of its own education: “In [Orwell's] <i>1984</i>, Winston can find only rubbish on what few shelves of second-hand books he encounters in obscure shops; nearly everything published before the Revolution has been burned or pulped. The ‘democratic despotism’ dreaded by Tocqueville might accomplish, without formal political repression, the same result. The content of ‘basic readers’ in American public schools, for instance, has become thinner and thinner during recent decades: the great authors are supplanted by trivia.”<br />
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Kirk’s reference to basic readers reminds me of David Mulroy’s complaint when comparing modern daily readers with older grade equivalent readers from as late as the nineteenth century. In one popular intermediate reader, Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed & Brainerd Kellog, first published in 1878, students are asked to diagram sentences like: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’” - Whittier. “I fear newspapers more than a hundred-thousand bayonets.” - Napoleon. “He that allows himself to be a worm must not complain if he is trodden on.” - Kant. “It is better to write one word upon the rock than a thousand on the water or the sand.” - Gladstone.<br />
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Compare that with the sentences today’s students are asked to diagram at the equivalent intermediate level: “The red kangaroo hops.” “A bright, colorful rainbow appeared today.” “They washed and dried the sticky pots and greasy pans.” “Aunt Amy and Uncle Andy sent their nephews, Bruce and Bobby, some cake and cookies.” There does seem to be a difference somehow.<br />
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As early as 1977, a group of educators published <i>The Test Score Decline: Meaning and Issues</i>, discussing the noticeable decline in American test scores since the 1960s. Two of the authors, Annigret Harnischfeger & David E. Wiley specifically analyzed the “alarming news of achievement test score declines” and explained how they had first tried to account for these declines by the tests and the tests’ standards themselves:<br />
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“In evaluating the findings, our first explanatory attempt concerned the measurement instruments that showed the declining score trends. But we soon had to conclude that changes in scoring, scaling, testing conditions or test content could not explain the larger achievement decreases ... In general, test content changes might have to take responsibility for slight score changes, but they can definitely not explain the general phenomenon. Some non-content, technical changes in tests worked in the opposite direction. For example, we found that changes in two tests (SAT, PSAT) had resulted in scaling increases. Thus, accounting for these would even augment the magnitudes of achievement test score declines.”<br />
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Changing the standards is certainly one way to ignore a decline. In 1994, Charles Krauthammer reported in the <i>Chicago Tribune </i>of one instance of such a scoring tweak:<br />
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“The nation's SAT scores are going to be ‘recentered.’ ... When the modern SATs were started in 1941, the average score was 500. They have since slid 76 points in verbal and 22 points in math. Because ‘most infrequent users of the SAT expect the average to be about 500,’ explains the College Board, they tend to misinterpret the results. They think a 424 verbal is below average, whereas in fact it is today's sorry mean. We will now cure them of this debilitating misapprehension by ‘recentering’: By decree, every 424 turns into a cool 500.”<br />
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Rewritten and revised in order to make it appear as if the scores were not as low as they really were, American SAT scores could still at least have tolerable looking averages even after schools were failing to teach as they ought. Discussing the decline in functional literacy among American students, David Mulroy explains as follows:<br />
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“The clearest evidence of a problem in language arts instruction may lie in the well-known decline in the nation’s SAT scores. Both verbal and quantitative scores began to sink in 1963 ... The average verbal score dropped over 50 points, from 478 in 1963 to the 420s in the seventies. The quantitative score fell from 502 to 466 in 1980. Subsequently, quantitative scores rebounded somewhat, but verbal scores stayed in the 420s. In 1996, The College Board ‘recentered’ the SAT scores. The average verbal score for that year, 428, was reported as 505; the quantitative average was changed from 488 to 512. In 2002, the recentered averages were 504 (verbal) and 516 (mathematics).”<br />
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But one can only do this sort of thing so many times. More recently, both national and international test scores are looking even worse in spite of the fact that the United States spends more on education per student than almost any other developed country in the world. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/355271/education-spending-soars-test-scores-stagnate-deroy-murdock">Deroy Murdock writes in <i>National Review</i>:</a><br />
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“<a href="http://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart">As ... the Cato Institute’s Andrew J. Coulson irrefutably illustrates</a>, the trouble with U.S. education is not a scarcity of tax dollars thrown in its general direction. The spending curve of government outlays on K-12 education from 1970-2010 is essentially an upward-sloping 45-degree angle. The curves representing reading, math, and science test scores are all 0-degree angles. These commonly are called flat lines. For all the lavish expenditures that have been lobbed into America’s government schools, U.S. student performance is in its fifth decade of suspended animation.”<br />
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Look at recent numbers, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/01/26/education-spending-balloons-but-students-in-some-states-get-more-money-than-others/"><i>The Washington Post</i> reports</a> that there is simply “no question that state spending per pupil has drastically increased since the 1970s.” And <a href="http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/01/22/18wop-states.h33.html?tkn=WXQFG9JNpdeHsDE%2Fbuyvixy46a2HdGAoYyAs&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2"><i>Education Week</i> also reports</a> that while test scores have fallen or remained stagnant, even adjusted for inflation, actual spending per student has radically increased.<br />
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Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was interviewed and asked about what increased U.S. education spending has meant:<br />
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“When you look at what really matters — student achievement — then the country hasn't made much progress since the War on Poverty launched, Mr. Hanushek said. He pointed to scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and international tests that, he said, show U.S. student performance remaining ‘pretty flat’ over recent decades even as K-12 spending has risen dramatically. What's more, he said, high-spending states haven't shown dramatically better student achievement progress than low-spending states.”<br />
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<a href="http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/education-spending-increases-while-results-stagnate.html/?a=viewall">Colleen Casey analyzes the numbers over at the <i>Wall Street Cheat Sheet</i></a>, demonstrating that, at times, schools with more federal money did worse while schools with less spending per student did better:<br />
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“A comparison of standardized test scores between the top and bottom spenders – Washington, D.C. and Utah – results in an inverse of expectations. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (or, NAEP) is a continual assessment of American students. Uniform tests are administered, and results can be compared by state. Utah, who spent the least in education spending in the 2009-2010 period, tended to score higher than the national averages, except in fourth and eighth grade writing. Washington, D.C. pupils had scores lower than the national averages. Utah has more schools and students, but fewer teachers than Washington. Even when federal revenues are added to the equation, Utah still spends less per pupil than Washington, DC.<br />
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The spending paradox is visible internationally as well. The United States spends more on education per student than any other developed country in the world, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (or, OECD). The report pegs federal per student spending in the U.S. at about $15,171 per student. The OECD average was $9,313. Even with a hefty education price tag, students in the U.S. do not out-perform their international peers.”<br />
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If this is all overwhelming, things look even worse when we compare ourselves internationally. <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/">The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently released their annual international report on education</a> for the world’s most developed countries.<br />
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“Results relevant to the United States? For the year 2010, we spent more than $11,000 per elementary student and more than $12,000 per high school student. Factoring in other remedial, technological and vocational training, and the number rounds out to a nice $15,171 per American student. This is more spent per student than any other developed nation in the world. This is more than anyone else in dollars. It is also more than any developed country in terms of the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). This leadership is money spent is then matched by American students consistently testing below the international averages in both math and language literacy.”<br />
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Not to be fazed by all this even a little, <a href="http://polhudson.lohudblogs.com/2014/01/14/view-cuomos-education-reform-commission-issues-final-report-recommendations/">the current Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo has, for example, called for increased spending on New York’s schools</a>, including fully state-funded full-day pre-kindergarten and he has asked for the borrowing of another $2 billion to fund the upgrading of technology for his school districts.<br />
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<b>Reprioritizing What We Think Is Important</b><br />
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What is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of all, any informative discussion of the current state of our education system causes the eyes to glaze over and the mind to retreat with boredom. True education reform is simply not an issue that interests most Americans, nor do we consider it to be a top priority. The extent of our lackadaisical attitude towards education can be measured by the fact that we have allowed our schools to reach the point that they have now reached. But it can also be measured by actual discussion in the public square.<br />
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Looking at, by my count, one hundred and twenty-seven respectable public opinion polls on what Americans think are the most important political issues that our country faces going as far back as 2002 <a href="http://www.pollingreport.com/prioriti.htm">(and taken nationally by sources such as <i>Gallup</i>, <i>Reuters</i>, <i>USA Today</i>, <i>CBS News</i>, <i>CNN</i>, <i>Newsweek</i>, <i>Fox News</i>, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, <i>The Washington Post</i>, <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>Opinion Dynamics</i>, <i>The Pew Research Center</i>, <i>NPR</i>, etc.)</a>, the importance of education as an issue has been almost completely ignored or belittled for more than the last decade.<br />
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For instance, looking at the most recent twenty-one polls through 2012 that specifically asked Americans what issue they thought was the most important, only 7 out of the 21 polls included, or even allowed for, education as an option. For example, a <i>Gallup</i> Poll conducted on June 20-24, 2013, asked the question, <i>“Looking ahead, what is your greatest worry or concern about the future of the United States?”</i> Answers ranked as follows: The Economy first according to 17%. The National Debt second at 11%. Jobs & Employment third with 6%. Wars fourth at 5%. Healthcare and three other topics all tied for fifth place each at 4%. And Education tied for last, along with National Security and Government overreach, each at 3%.<br />
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Among these polls, the best that Education placed in ranked importance was when CBS News conducted one from July 18-22, 2013, asking the question <i>“Which one of the following do you think is the most important thing for Congress to concentrate on right now: the economy, the federal budget deficit, illegal immigration, health care, education, the environment, abortion, or something else?”</i> The Economy took first place with 40%. The Federal Budget Deficit took second with 16%. Health Care came in third at 15%. And Education came in fourth place at 12%.<br />
<br />
In the other five polls that mentioned education at all, it placed only at three and two percent.<br />
<br />
In 2006, education reformer E.D. Hirsch, Jr., wrote:<br />
<br />
“The public sees that something is badly amiss in the education of our young people. Employers now often need to rely on immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe to do the math that our own high school graduates cannot do. We score low among developed nations in international comparisons of science, math, and reading. This news is in fact more alarming than most people realize, since our students perform relatively worse on international comparisons the longer they stay in our schools. In fourth grade, American students score ninth in reading among thirty-five countries, which is respectable. By tenth grade they score fifteenth in reading among twenty-seven countries, which is not promising at all for their (and our) economic future.”<br />
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Let’s pause for a moment to consider what this means. Most recently, we have seen education reform after education reform. In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration promoted the fad of what they called “Outcome-Based Education” and legislation was passed to raise our schools’ academic standards and increase our education spending. In 2001, the Bush administration worked out a bipartisan plan with the Democrats called “No Child Left Behind” and legislation was passed to raise our school’s academic standards and increase our education spending. In 2009, the Obama administration advocated for what has been called “Race to the Top” offering $4.35 billion in federal grants to elementary schools that could show they had raised their academic standards. Also in 2009, the “Common Core” federal standards were developed and they are now being adopted by almost every state in the union. What have all these education reforms accomplished?<br />
<br />
As far as any documented real-world results go, they have accomplished
nothing other than the exorbitant spending of taxpayers’ money. Nothing
changed that the schools were not already doing before, other than
making schools spend even more time trying to prepare students for the
newly required standardized tests. Meanwhile, our schools continue
helping students test poorly and then graduating many who are still
functionally illiterate, and more and more of whom require remedial math
and English training and tutoring upon entering college or university.<br />
<br />
I am reminded of the story that film critic Kyle Smith told about when the documentary film, <i>Waiting for ‘Superman’</i>,
appeared in 2010. He arrived at the movie theater only to see large
groups of protestors outside “standing in circles chanting slogans,”
holding signs and generally trying to deter patrons from entering the
movie theater. He discovered that the teachers’ unions had organized a
protest of the documentary when he was handed a pamphlet entitled “THE
TRUTH about Charter Schools in New York City.” <a href="http://kylesmithonline.com/?p=6956">Upon reading the pamphlet, Smith wrote:</a><br />
<br />
“Here is the first sentence:<br />
<br />
<i>Access to a high quality public education is not something that
should not be won in a lottery — it is a most basic human and civil
right.</i><br />
<br />
I read the sentence four times. Did it really say what
I thought it said? Did it use a double negative to aver that access to a
high quality public education is something that should be won in a
lottery? Yep. Think of all the effort that went into organizing,
writing, editing, printing and distributing this leaflet. And no one
along the line caught that error. Really doesn’t restore your confidence
in the teachers’ unions, does it?”<br />
<br />
As bad as it all sounds, the
really frustrating thing is that none of the attempts to remedy the
problem seem to be working. In Waiting for ‘Superman,’ the toughest and
most competent looking person working in education appears to be
Michelle Rhee, who as appointed chancellor of Washington D.C.’s public
schools. As soon as she began firing incompetent principals and
changing what was clearly not working, she faced an incredible negative
publicity campaign launched by the teachers unions against her. Ms.
Rhee was then essentially kicked out, figuratively tarred and feathered,
and then run out of town on a rail.<br />
<br />
Even more frustrating are the reports of what the Obama administration’s latest “Common Core” standards really consist of.<br />
<br />
On
January 11, education historian, Diane Ravitch, who is a liberal, gave a
speech heavily criticizing the new “Common Core” standards to the
Modern Language Association. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/18/everything-you-need-to-know-about-common-core-ravitch/">In her speech, Ms. Ravitch sounded both fierce and passionate:</a><br />
<br />
<i>“George
W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top have
combined to impose a punitive regime of standardized testing on the
schools. NCLB was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law in
2002. NCLB law required schools to test every child in grades 3-8 every
year; by 2014, said the law, every child must be “proficient” or schools
would face escalating sanctions. The ultimate sanction for failure to
raise test scores was firing the staff and closing the school.<br /><br />“Then
along came the Obama administration, with its signature program called
Race to the Top. In response to the economic crisis of 2008, Congress
gave the U.S. Department of Education $5 billion to promote ‘reform.’
Secretary Duncan launched a competition for states called ‘Race to the
Top.’ If states wanted any part of that money, they had to agree to
certain conditions. They had to agree to evaluate teachers to a
significant degree by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores;
they had to agree to increase the number of privately managed charter
schools; they had to agree to adopt ‘college and career ready
standards,’ which were understood to be the not-yet-finished Common Core
standards; they had to agree to ‘turnaround’ low-performing schools by
such tactics as firing the principal and part or all of the school
staff; and they had to agree to collect unprecedented amounts of
personally identifiable information about every student and store it in a
data warehouse.<br /><br />“No other nation in the world has inflicted so
many changes or imposed so many mandates on its teachers and public
schools as we have in the past dozen years. No other nation tests every
student every year as we do. Our students are the most over-tested in
the world. No other nation—at least no high-performing nation—judges the
quality of teachers by the test scores of their students. Most
researchers agree that this methodology is fundamentally flawed, that it
is inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable, that the highest ratings will
go to teachers with the most affluent students and the lowest ratings
will go to teachers of English learners, teachers of students with
disabilities, and teachers in high-poverty schools. Nonetheless, the
U.S. Department of Education wants every state and every district to do
it. Because of these federal programs, our schools have become obsessed
with standardized testing, and have turned over to the testing
corporations the responsibility for rating, ranking, and labeling our
students, our teachers, and our schools.</i><br />
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<i>“The Common Core standards were written in 2009 under the aegis of several D.C.-based organizations: the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve. The development process was led behind closed doors by a small organization called Student Achievement Partners, headed by David Coleman. The writing group of 27 contained few educators, but a significant number of representatives of the testing industry. From the outset, the Common Core standards were marked by the absence of public participation, transparency, or educator participation. In a democracy, transparency is crucial, because transparency and openness builds trust. Those crucial ingredients were lacking ...”</i><br />
<br />
Even if you believe that Obamacare is bad for the country, if it is really is going to hurt the economy as much as some economists say that it will, then we at least will still have a fighting chance to modify or repeal it, given the bad publicity that will naturally go along with its harmful effects. But, if the curriculum of America’s schools has just been processed, stream-lined and standardized into a system that is even more incompetent than what we have now (and that has already been adopted by over 40 states with very little opposition), then we are going to irreparably damage an entire generation in a way that will not be able to be “repealed” after the fact.<br />
<br />
Ms. Ravitch was able to spend some time studying the only results that Common Core has produced so far. She continued:<br />
<br />
<i>“My fears were confirmed by the Common Core tests. Wherever they have been implemented, they have caused a dramatic collapse of test scores. In state after state, the passing rates dropped by about 30%. This was not happenstance. This was failure by design.<br /><br />“Early childhood educators are nearly unanimous in saying that no one who wrote the standards had any expertise in the education of very young children. More than 500 early childhood educators signed a joint statement complaining that the standards were developmentally inappropriate for children in the early grades. <br /><br />“There has also been heated argument about the standards’ insistence that reading must be divided equally in the elementary grades between fiction and informational text, and divided 70-30 in favor of informational text in high school. Where did the writers of the standards get these percentages? They relied on the federal NAEP—the National Assessment of Educational Progress-which uses these percentages as instructions to test developers. NAEP never intended that these numbers would be converted into instructional mandates for teachers. This idea that informational text should take up half the students’ reading time in the early grades and 70% in high school led to outlandish claims that teachers would no longer be allowed to teach whole novels. Somewhat hysterical articles asserted that the classics would be banned while students were required to read government documents. The standards contain no such demands.<br /><br />“The fact is that the Common Core standards should never have set forth any percentages at all. If they really did not mean to impose numerical mandates on English teachers, they set off a firestorm of criticism for no good reason. Other nations have national standards, and I don’t know of any that tell teachers how much time to devote to fiction and how much time to devote to informational text. Frankly, I think that teachers are quite capable of making that decision for themselves. If they choose to teach a course devoted only to fiction or devoted only to non-fiction, that should be their choice, not a mandate imposed by a committee in 2009.<br /><br />“In some states, teachers say that the lessons are scripted and deprive them of their professional autonomy, the autonomy they need to tailor their lessons to the needs of the students in front of them. Behind the Common Core standards lies a blind faith in standardization of tests and curriculum, and perhaps, of children as well.”</i><br />
<br />
I am currently reading and conducting more research on the Common Core, so I will write on this in more detail in the future. In the meantime, let us consider a simple proposition.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nY8JynFxUko" width="560"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
Proposition: at a fundamental level, if the education of a society is wrecked and remains wrecked, then nothing else that society does to save itself will matter.<br />
<br />
Assume, for the sake of thinking about this, that you honestly believe the economy and job creation is the most important issue in the United States today. What gives an economy an employable workforce? Education. What makes an economy innovative and productive? Educated thinkers. What assists those who do not have the skills to be employable to gain skills to be employable? Education.<br />
<br />
Let’s pretend that you understand how economics works better than anyone else does. In a democratic system of government, you still have to persuade a majority of the populace that your economic understand is what will work. You will have to use logic and reason to the voters that a particular economic plan will work best. But what if they have trouble following a line of reasoning? What if discourse has devolved to the point that reasonable explanations and thoughtful, careful arguments are ignored because no one understands them? What if the average voter is no longer literate enough to be able to follow a line of economic reasoning? Then nothing else matters. The public will have to be educated first before anything else will happen. (Assuming, still, that you live in a democratic system.)<br />
<br />
This applies no matter what your favorite or most hallowed political issue happens to be. It doesn't matter whether you believe that the national debt, national security, foreign policy, heath care, abortion, family values, social justice, social security, partisan politics or even corroded ideological narrow-minded bigotry is the issue that our country and government most needs to deal with. If the public is growing less and less educated, then reasoned discourse is going to grow less and less reasoned. If the voter is less literate, then he is not going to follow complicated reasoning. Simplistic rather than complex solutions will appeal to him. Magical solutions will be more convincing that practical or realistic ones.<br />
<br />
Journalism will devolve into entertainment and ideological hacks shouting at each other. Public debate will deteriorate into the equivalent of a grade school level sort of discourse that occurs when bullies fight over lunch money. The more thought, time, research and reasoning that you invest into explaining what you believe is most important, the less anyone will understand you or care to listen to you.<br />
<br />
If all this is true, then how can education not be the most important issue we are now facing?<br />
<br />
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<b>Further Evidence That The Problem Is Serious</b><br />
<br />
There are many more examples, but I will focus upon only one more for the purposes of this essay. Consider once more the falling verbal scores and literacy of American students today. What if I told you that there is a century old organization of English teachers (the largest organization of its kind) that claims to be devoted to promoting literacy in the United States? Founded in 1911, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Council_of_Teachers_of_English">National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)</a>, has over eighty-thousand members and every year releases numerous publications about teaching. Consequently, the NCTE exerts great influence over both the content and procedures of English teaching in the United States.<br />
<br />
And, then, what if I told you that the NCTE, <i>the</i> organization devoted to promoting literacy for American students, has spent decades convincing teachers to no longer formally teach English grammar?<br />
<br />
That’s right. <b>The largest organization of English teachers, devoted to promoting literacy in the United States, argues against teaching English grammar.</b><br />
<br />
In his 2003 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Grammar-CrossCurrents/dp/0867095512/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393632670&sr=1-1&keywords=the+war+against+grammar"><i>The War Against Grammar</i></a>, David Mulroy writes:<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
“Over the years, NCTE publications have often provided a platform for teachers opposed to emphasizing grammar. Their anti-grammar stance is especially associated with the name of Charles Fries, a linguist from the University of Michigan. Fries first came to notice in 1925 with the publication by the Modern Language Association of his doctoral dissertation on the use of <i>shall</i> and <i>will</i> and was a prominent member of the NCTE for many years. He advocated the use of scientific methods by linguists. This meant that linguists needed to part company from traditional grammarians in two ways: First, they should refrain from telling people how they ought to express themselves and concentrate instead on describing the facts of language. Second, their definitions and rules should not require any intuitive judgments but should be based solely on empirical observations.”<br />
<br />
Charles Fries thus applied modern linguistic theory, which opposes
formal rules of grammar, to the teaching of English itself. Arguing
that the teaching of traditional English grammar was both
counterproductive and unscientific, his ideas have been accepted and
promoted by the NCTE. For instance, in 1963, the NCTE published a
report entitled “Research in Written Composition,” which concluded: “In
view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many
types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong
and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible
or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in
composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing.” <a href="http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/grammarexercises">At their annual convention in 1985</a>,
the NCTE adopted the following resolution: “Resolved, that the NCTE
affirm the position that the use of isolated grammar and usage exercises
not supported by theory and research is a deterrent to the improvement
of students’ speaking and writing and that, in order to improve both of
these, class time at all levels must be devoted to opportunities for
meaningful listening, speaking, reading, and writing; and that NCTE urge
the discontinuance of testing practices that encourage the teaching of
grammar rather than English language arts instruction.” In 1991, the
NCTE published the <i>Handbook for Research on Teaching the English Language Arts</i>.
It concluded: “School boards, administrators, and teachers who impose
the systematic study of traditional school grammar on their students
over lengthy periods of time in the name of teaching writing do them a
gross disservice which should not be tolerated by anyone concerned with
the effective teaching of good writing.”<br />
<br />
Looking at <a href="http://www.ncte.org/">the NCTE’s website today in 2014</a> is not encouraging. Under a link entitled <a href="http://www.ncte.org/centennial/blastfrompast/grammar">“Blast from the Past: The Teaching of Grammar,”</a> we can find the following:<br />
<br />
“Did
you know that the controversy over the direct teaching of grammar is
not a new one? In the March 1946 English Journal, educator and former
NCTE President Lou LaBrant wrote: ‘We have some hundreds of studies now
which demonstrate that there is little correlation ... between exercises
in punctuation and sentence structure and the tendency to use the
principles illustrated in independent writing.’ ... Did you know ‘the
reason many students don't retain grammar information is because they
can't?’ Ann L. Warner raised this key aspect of direct grammar
instruction in a 1986 English Journal article that noted ‘only about
half the adolescent and adult population reach the highest levels of
formal operational thinking’ needed to manage grammar in isolation.”<br />
<br />
Combine that with other things like <a href="http://www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/08894/08894f5.html">“Facts on the teaching of Grammar”</a> and you begin to wonder why it is that NCTE bothers to at all. What you <i>will</i>
find is a very large number of articles and links about how to teach
using computers or “digital” technology. The NCTE seems to be convinced
that the use of computers has revolutionized the teaching of English.
They also seem to be spending a great deal of time discussing what they
are calling “21st Century Literacies” (plural). <a href="http://www.ncte.org/">On their front webpage</a>, the “Featured Items” don’t look too promising. One, entitled <a href="https://secure.ncte.org/store/adolescents-and-digital-literacies">“Adolescents and Digital Literacies”</a>
has a summary that states “Sara Kajder examines ways in which teachers
and students co-construct new literacies through technology-infused
practices.” Try to guess what that sentence means. There is,
apparently, not only more than one <i>kind</i> of “Digital Literacy” but
there will be even more kinds of them once you co-construct new ones
right along with your students in a technological infusion.<br />
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If you were <a href="https://secure.ncte.org/store/adolescents-and-digital-literacies">to click that link</a> you would be informed that “Through extensive interviews and classroom experiences, Kajder offers examples of both students and teachers who have successfully integrated technology to enrich literacy learning.” Well, successful technological integration is something we want, isn’t it? It certainly sounds exciting in a 21st Century sort of way. Technology, you understand, enriches what they call literacy learning rather than cheapens it. The promotional continues: “As part of the <i>Principles in Practice</i> imprint, <i>Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students</i> offers critical consideration of students’ in-school and out-of-school digital literacy practices in a practical, friendly, and easily approachable manner.” It’s nice of them really. How often are you offered “critical consideration” that is also friendly and easily approachable? Learning about the out-of-school digital literacy practices of students should help, shouldn't it? But this gets better.<br />
<br />
Another link entitled <a href="http://www.ncte.org/topics/shared-responsibility">“Literacy as a Shared Responsibility”</a> leads to a page that quotes a Mr. K. Williamson, who declares: “As we move beyond earlier notions of ‘reading and writing,’ the boundaries between literacy processes blur, and responsibility for supporting literacy learners expands to include educators across all disciplines.” This quote is taken from Mr. Williamson’s blog. Intrigued, <a href="http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/blog/responding-shifting-literacies">I went there to find more:</a><br />
<br />
Apparently, there is something or other called “Shifting Literacies” that we are supposed to respond to. Mr. Williamson suggests, somewhat impenetrably, that teachers (here called “educator groups and teams”) need to be aware of all the nifty new gimmicks and boldly innovative technological infusions for the teaching of multiple, dynamic and malleable shifting literacies. Mr. Williamson is not at all ashamed to admit that the NCTE “has issued an updated version” of “its definition of 21st century literacies.” Nor does he seek to deny his interest in some things that he calls “affordances of new digital tools” or his conviction that “what it means to be literate has shifted - again.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/ncte-definition-21st-century-literacies">Mr. Williamson then links to the NCTE's new definition of literacy.</a> They (the NCTE Executive Committee) <a href="http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/sites/default/files/2013_the_ncte_definition_of_21st_century_literacies.pdf">tell us all about</a>
how their “NCTE definition of 21st century literacies makes it clear
that the continued evolution of curriculum, assessment, and teaching
practice itself is necessary.” (It is nice of them, really, to tell us
what their definition makes clear before subjecting us to the definition
itself.) The same Executive Committee calls literacy “a collection of
cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular
groups” and brings us word on how new “technology has increased the
intensity and complexity of literate environments.” (These are of
course to be distinguished from illiterate environments, whatever they
may be. Just don’t ask the National Council of Teachers of English.)<br />
<br />
Next
we hear of how all these literacies are also increasingly “multiple,
dynamic, and malleable,” a nasty thought, which, if it weren't already
complicated enough, also includes being “inextricably linked with
particular histories, life possibilities, and social trajectories ...”
Well, those who are busy with important stuff like the dynamism and
malleability of the life possibilities and social trajectories of groups
and individuals with multiple literacies in complex literate
environments certainly can’t be bothered about trivia like the
appropriate coordination of the words of an English sentence so that it
possesses at least one actual meaning.<br />
<br />
Worse is in store. The
Executive Committee also informs us that “Active, successful
participants in this 21st century global society must be able to”, among
other things, “Build intentional cross-cultural connections and
relationships ... Design and share information for global communities
... Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous
information ... Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
...” and “Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these
complex environments.” In educationistic prose, it is not a surprise
when multiple information streams are simultaneous, but that stupendous
verb pileup will call forth awe and envy in all professionals of
education. That last bit, furthermore, is not entirely without wisdom,
for many will surely testify to the curiously <i>ethical</i>
responsibilities that derive from these complex technologically-infused
multiple literate environments, or something very like them at least.<br />
<br />
Mr.
Williamson is so excited by this new global updated shifted definition
of 21st Century multiple literacies that he explains to us (with
appropriate rapture) how this “definition not only calls for proficiency
with emerging technology,” but “it uses evocative new phrases to
describe what literate people do.”<br />
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Speaking of evocative new phrases (darlings of all educator professionals), Mr. Williamson is careful to point out that we are moving beyond earlier notions of “reading and writing” (his quotation marks) and that this moving beyond causes literacy processes to blur. <a href="http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/blog/responding-shifting-literacies">From his blog post</a>, I can’t quite tell what “literacy processes” are, but that’s ok, because they are definitely achieving the desired blurring effect.<br />
<br />
There also exists, as Mr. Williamson tells us, another document entitled <i>The Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment</i> which “builds on this more capacious definition of literacy.” (The NCTE <i>does</i> so very much love more capacious definitions.) And how is this new definition built upon? By “making explicit the implications of how teachers plan, support, and assess student learning” and this, in turn, “helps teachers and school-based teams assess their progress by asking direct questions about current practices.” The Executive Committee have their principles, you know. They will never, for instance, do anything without frameworks for assessment and they are deeply, oh so deeply, committed to anticipating “the more sophisticated literacy skills and abilities required for full participation in a global 21st century community.”<br />
<br />
Mr. Williamson fondly ruminates that, as he watched “the work of educator groups and teams unfold,” he was struck “by the parallels between the student literacy skills and practices” and “the practices of educator teams engaged in collaborative inquiry.” To illustrate, he remembers how “the NCLE Asset Inventory challenges teams to evaluate how well they ‘work through a cycle of planing, acting, and reflecting on evidence about our practice.’” (<a href="http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/asset-inventory">The “Asset Inventory”</a> was written to be a survey tool provided to help self-assess the degree to which the conditions and practices that lead to successful learning are present in day-to-day work experiences. This survey tool gives consideration to the content of professional learning in conjunction with the process of learning.)<br />
<br />
I’d have been curious to see this “Asset Inventory” actually work. If the NCTE (or was it the F21stCCA? No, I think it was the NCLE) knows as much about multiple shifting literacies as they do about writing inventories, which seems inevitable, and if the “Asset Inventory” was written in English no better than the rest of their stuff, the reading of it, by any educated person, would lead to a serious self-assessment of a very high degree. Mr. Williamson, however, is unable to provide even one single instance of any self-assessment or reflection that led to any serious questioning here of “our practice,” and <i>that</i> tells us something about those teachers of English in the National Council.<br />
<br />
Of course, one could have guessed it from the NCTE’s website. No one who cares about accuracy or precision in language could ever have written any of these NCTE documents on the redefining of shifting mutliple digital literacies, and no one committed to disciplined intelligence could bear to read it. That the NCTEers <i>do</i> write it, and that teachers of English <i>do</i> bear it, should disabuse us of the quaint notion that our English teachers have been trained in writing clear English prose.<br />
<br />
This is the sort of thing that happens to one’s organization of English
teachers when one’s organization of English teachers decides against the
formal teaching of English grammar.<br />
<br />
(Sidenote & Apology: I dearly love the essays of Richard Mitchell, and I hereby apologize to Mr. Mitchell for shamelessly ripping off his April 4, 1979 <i>Underground Grammarian</i> essay, <a href="http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/">“Eric Smeac’s Practice-related Information Domain”</a> in order respond to Mr. Kent Williamson’s Shifting & Updating Definitions of Multiple & Dynamic Literacies. As soon as I started reading the publications of the NCTE, I had to immediately flee to Mr. Mitchell for help.)<br />
<br />
<b>Concluding Thoughts</b><br />
<br />
The respected educator & author of a number of reliable English grammar textbooks, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Martha%20J.%20Kolln&search-alias=books&sort=relevancerank">Martha J. Kolln</a>, has <a href="http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ847258.pdf">called
attention to how this contempt for the formal teaching of English
grammar has influenced the education of teachers themselves:</a><br />
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“The cost to English education of the NCTE anti-grammar policy is impossible to calculate. The policy has affected more than the K-12 curriculum itself; equally important, has been the negative effect on teacher education. The strides that linguistics has made during the past several decades has almost completely eluded the prospective English teacher. Rarely does an English or education major’s program call for more than one or two courses having to do with language - possibly a class that includes the history of English and/or an introduction to linguistics. But many teacher-training programs certify secondary English teachers without the students having had a single course in modern grammar. And it’s certainly possible that these new teachers had little or no grammar instruction in their own middle-school and high-school experiences.”<br />
<br />
The damage has now already been done to multiple generations. For the vast majority of the current generation of teachers, the education that <i>they</i> received was already fundamentally flawed to begin with. Remedying this will be difficult. It is going to require some self-education for some teachers and some mandatory remedial teacher training for others.<br />
<br />
But, in some small corners of the country, there are still little examples that give reason for hope. There are still some teachers who are committed to <i>teaching</i> rather than to being infatuated with new educationist theories, new academic jargon filled pep talks and the forever new upgrading of classroom technology.<br />
<br />
Pioneer Classical School in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, was founded in 2011. It is now restructuring itself in order to meet demand and provide education to children from kindergarten through the eighth grade. It will now be called the Jackson Hole Classical Academy. <a href="http://planetjh.com/2014/01/14/school-of-thought-progressive-jackson-academy-offers-classical-education/">When one of the teachers, Moira Hyde, was recently interviewed</a>, she described how their little school does things differently from the majority of the country’s schools:<br />
<br />
“When we say classical education what we mean is focusing on the trivium: Grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And those things being the basis of a well-rounded education. It’s also going back to basics in that you don’t need to have some fancy textbook to learn something and you don’t have to have access to the Internet to learn something. There are true, honest ways you can learn.”<br />
<br />
The school was started by the members of a church, but refreshingly, its purpose was <i>not</i> to shield its students from “the secular world” or to give religious teaching rather the teaching of evolution. Headmistress Polly Friess said:<br />
<br />
“We believe that families and churches are responsible for spiritual instruction and we want to support it, not supplant it. We don’t use any Christian curriculum here. We don’t have a Bible study class or anything like that. We are not affiliated with any specific church but we are a Christian school because the whole classical tradition is based on the Western civilization, Judeo-Christian tradition. It just is. Christian families can feel welcome here as well as non-Christians.”<br />
<br />
Founder and CEO of Great Hearts Academies, Dr. Daniel Scoggin, was also interviewed. He questioned the focus of other schools who are trying to appeal to children’s desires to work on their computers or iPhones:<br />
<br />
“Our kids are so pounded with pop culture, you know? They are all so hardwired and cell phone wired. The average teenager right now sends and receives 1,800 text messages a month. The amount of visual media, screen culture consumption is off the charts. That’s OK, that’s the future. We’re not Luddites. We’re not trying to raise our kids in bubbles. But at the same time we want the schools to be a quiet, reflective space away from all the noise where they can actually engage real human face-to-face conversation. Where they can learn how to read and think clearly and solve problems both alone and with others.”<br />
<br />
In other words, you can teach things like math and English effectively without computers and without pop cultural references. You don’t have to show your students Youtube videos or television episodes in order to bribe them for their attention. Thus, Scoggins explains: “We don’t use pop culture in the school. We don’t try to explain Shakespeare by talking about the latest movie. That’s dumbing down to the kid, saying you can’t understand Shakespeare for Shakespeare. You can only understand Shakespeare if it’s compared to Star Wars. That’s wrong.”<br />
<br />
And their results are far different from the vast majority of other American schools: “We are really pleased with our college admission. Our average SAT score is 1830 and ACT is 27.3. Most of our kids are getting scholarship money and 95 percent of our kids are going on to four-year colleges and universities.”<br />
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<br />
Little classical schools are regularly turning out the highest level educations across the land. And, yes, these are the schools that teach old things like formal English grammar and dead-languages like Latin and even Greek. Liberal arts & humanities education has not been proven to be out-dated, irrelevant or impractical. Besides, Steven Spielberg and Mitt Romney were both English majors. CEO of Hewlett-Packward, Carly Fiorina, majored in Philosophy and Medieval History. CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, majored in history. Co-founder of <i>Flickr</i>, Stewart Butterfield, was a Philosophy major. Comedian Conan O’Brien majored in History & American Literature. Jon Stewart, creator of <i>The Daily Show</i>, was a Psychology major. Ted Turner and J.K. Rowling were both Classics majors. All these people did just fine.<br />
<br />
Classical education, wherever it is still being used, already has proven results. There is a reason why these schools are considered elite and there is a reason why most of them are filled with students from primarily upper class families. If we really want true education reform in our country, then perhaps we should allow students from middle and lower class families the opportunity to receive this sort of time-tested elite education as well.<br />
<br />
In conclusion, I dare you, the reader, to take even one hour to research the current state of the local schools in your city or town. Every school district releases test score results periodically, even if sometimes delayed. If you were to only look online, websites like <a href="http://www.schooldigger.com/">http://www.schooldigger.com/</a>, <a href="http://www.greatschools.org/">http://www.greatschools.org/</a>, <a href="http://parents4publicschools.org/">http://parents4publicschools.org/</a> and <a href="http://www.edreform.com/">http://www.edreform.com/</a> all offer resources and information about rankings, test scores, dropout rates, college admission rates, parental involvement and advocacy groups. Then, if you were to compare the current results that your local schools are producing with the kind of results that they <i>could</i> be producing (say at places like <a href="http://projects.nytimes.com/new-york-schools-test-scores/counties/kings/districts/new-york-city-district-15/schools/hellenic-classical-charter">here</a> or <a href="http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/rhode-island/districts/providence-public-school-district/classical-high-school-17505">here</a> or <a href="http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/new-york/districts/new-york-city-public-schools/the-brooklyn-latin-school-13410">HERE</a>), you might wonder why in the world the majority of our country’s schoolchildren are being deprived of real education - why your local schools are <i>not</i> teaching the older things that our country's most successful schools <i>are</i> teaching.<br />
<br />
Please remember. This should not be a matter of political partisan line drawing. Diane Ravitch, E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Susan Jacoby are all politically liberals. All of them have glowing things to say about classical education and ancient traditions like the teaching of grammar in grammar school. All of them would be natural allies to the conservative interested in ridding our schools of some of the more hapless 20th Century progressive reforms.<br />
<br />
All the high-tech, digital age loving, 21st Century global economy jargon and standardized test fixations in the world are not going to change what has always worked in school. All the Academic educationalist experimentalist journals, studies, committees, sub-committees, executive committees and literacy assessment learning programs & procedures in the country are not going to suddenly figure out how to use a computer in a way that will make super-teachers who can finally capture the attention of their students. There is a <i>right</i> way to give the citizen of a democratic society the education that will prepare him or her for reasoned discourse in the public square. There is a <i>right</i> method of education that has already given students the well-rounded intelligence they need to succeed at any chosen career path. It was the classical model that had worked for centuries. We decided that right way of doing things was suddenly too old-fashioned and outdated and boring. We were wrong.<br />
<br />
In 1928, T.S. Eliot complained that progressive reforms in our schools had produced a culture with “persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time.” He cautioned that “when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing - when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences for which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation,” that we would lack understanding in the very simplest and most elementary of things. Eliot would be distressed to discover (a) how prophetic he really was, and then (b) how things then became worse.<br />
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<u><b>References:</b></u><br />
<br />
- The Associated Press. “U.S. education spending tops global list, study shows.” <i>CBSNews.</i> June 25, 2013.<br />
- Baker, Al. “Common Core Curriculum Now Has Its Critics on the Left.” <i>The New York Times.</i> February 16, 2014.<br />
- Campbell, Jon. “View: Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission issues final report, recommendations.” <i>Politics on the Hudson.</i> January 14, 2014.<br />
- CBS News Poll. “Frustrated with Congress, Americans See More Gridlock.” July 24, 2013.<br />
- Casey, Colleen. “Education Spending Increases While Results Stagnate.” <i>Wall Street Cheat Sheet.</i> January 27, 2014.<br />
- Coulson, Andrew J. “Can Litigation Save American Education?” <i>The Cato Institute.</i> January 22, 2014.<br />
- Coulson, Andrew J. “The Impact of Federal Involvement in America’s Classrooms.” <i>The Cato Institute.</i> February 10, 2011.<br />
- Gregoire, Carolyn. “This Is Irrefutable Evidence Of The Value of a Humanities Education.” <i>The Huffington Post.</i> January 28, 2014.<br />
- Eliot, T.S. <i>For Lancelot Andrewes.</i> 1928.<br />
- Harnischfeger, Annigret & Wiley, David E. <i>The Test Score Decline: Meaning and Issues.</i> 1977.<br />
- Hefling, Kimberly. “American Adults Score Poorly on Global Test.” <i>The Big Story.</i> October 8, 2013.<br />
- Hess, Frederick M. & Saxberg, Bror. “How to Use Technology in Education.” <i>National Review Online.</i> December 16, 2013.<br />
- Hirsch, Jr., E.D. <i>The Knowledge Deficit.</i> 2006.<br />
- Kirk, Russell. <i>Enemies of the Permanent Things.</i> 1969.<br />
- Kolln, Martha, Hancock, Craig. “The story of English grammar in United States schools.” <i>English Teaching: Practice and Critique.</i> 4, 11-31. 2005.<br />
- Krauthammer, Charles. “‘Recentered’ Scores Just Another Step Toward Mediocrity.” <i>The Chicago Tribune.</i> June 17. 1994.<br />
- Lurie, Stephen. “Obama’s Empty Rhetoric on Education.” <i> The Atlantic.</i> January 27, 2014.<br />
- McNeil, Michele & Ujifusa, Andrew. “Analysis Points to Growth in Per-Pupil Spending - and Disparities.” <i>Education Week.</i> January 22, 2014.<br />
- Moore, Terrence O. “The Common Core Is Not a Common Core.” <i>Ricochet.</i> December 19, 2013.<br />
- Moore, Terrence O. “The Making of an Educational Conservative.” <i>The Claremont Institute.</i> June 21, 2010.<br />
- Mulroy, David. <i>The War Against Grammar.</i> 2003.<br />
- Murdock, Deroy. “Education Spending Soars, Test Scores Stagnate.” <i>National Review Online.</i> August 7, 2013.<br />
- Nichols, Jake. “School of Thought: Progressive Jackson academy offers classical education.” <i>Planet Jackson Hole.</i> January 14, 2014.<br />
- “Problems and Priorities” at <i>PollingReport.com</i>.<br />
- Ravitch, Diane. “Everything you need to know about Common Core - Ravitch.” <i>The Washington Post.</i> January 18, 2014.<br />
- Sayers, Dorothy. “The Lost Tools of Learning.” An Address at Oxford University. 1947.<br />
- Simpson, Kevin. “Backlash against Common Core education standards surfaces in Colorado.” <i>The Denver Post.</i> January 27, 2014.<br />
- Smith, Kyle. “Teachers’ Unions Protesting ‘Waiting for Superman’.”<i> KyleSmithOnline.com.</i> September 24, 2010.<br />
- Strauss, Valerie. “Where U.S. stands in education internationally - new report.” <i>The Washington Post. </i> June 25, 2013.<br />
- Wilson, Reid. “Education spending balloons, but students in some states get more money than others.” <i>The Washington Post.</i> January 26, 2014.<br />
- Yatvin, Joanne. “A Flawed Approach to Reading in the Common-Core Standards.” <i>Education Week.</i> February 27, 2012.J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-18421820942461701512014-01-04T10:54:00.002-08:002014-02-25T18:36:33.041-08:00An Introduction to Owen BarfieldWhether you are considering politics, culture or theology, occasionally there comes along a thinker whose work has the potential to radically rearrange all of your own thinking on every major subject in which you spend time. Over the last year, I have been discovering with a great amount of enjoyment, that Owen Barfield (1898-1997) is such a thinker.<br />
<br />
Philosopher, philologist, lawyer, theologian, author, poet - Barfield was one of the Inklings drinking companions along with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Warren Lewis, Adam Fox, Hugo Dyson and Roger Lancelyn Green. Along with Tolkien, Barfield knew Lewis when he was still an atheist and it was Lewis’s conversations with Barfield that helped lead him to Christianity.<br />
<br />
As I continue to write, the influence of Barfield’s thinking will begin to appear in my own thought. But, for now, I can heartily and happily recommend an introductory talk on Barfield for the reader who is unfamiliar with him by modern day poet, Malcolm Guite. Enjoy.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/vWPaYqMYwbA" width="560"></iframe>J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-3268519895331013412013-12-03T21:48:00.000-08:002014-02-02T10:48:08.801-08:00GRAY MATTERS (2013) - by Brett McCracken (book review, Part II)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Let us begin this second part of exploring the ideas in Brett McCracken’s interesting book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Matters-Brett-McCracken/dp/0801014743"><i>Gray Matters</i></a>, with the qualification that there is much in his book that ought to be deeply appreciated and affirmed. For this reason, I discussed how much I heartily agreed with many of Mr. McCracken’s viewpoints in <a href="http://cincinnatusploughsare.blogspot.com/2013/10/gray-matters-2013-by-brett-mccracken.html">Part One of this book review</a>. Those of us who are strongly committed to articulating how our faith ought to rightly exist in life and culture can count him as among our number. Thus, I consider the questions and disagreements that I pose further in this review as those of the kind that can be asked and held between like-minded friends.<br />
<br />
In another sense, my disagreements with Mr. McCracken are those related to what could be described as tactical or rhetorical decisions ultimately directed towards the same ends. In discussing culture, art or politics, Christians and conservatives have to make proper distinctions. They also recently seem to have been neglecting tactical thinking regarding such subjects as “pop culture”, consumerism, church subculture, the relation of morality to culture, entertainment, the difference between high and low culture, and other closely related corollaries such as the doctrine of general revelation.<br />
<br />
It is rhetorical and tactical thinking here that I am interested in. How we choose to formulate our position requires that we use our language carefully. We must keep both history and our immediate audience in mind. Persuasion is an art form. Some forms of persuasion work more effectively than others. Other forms of persuasion work less effectively and yet are perhaps demanded by an adherence to the moral order in which we live.<br />
<br />
“It has been well established,” McCracken writes early in his book, “that Christians can find value in exploring secular pop culture.” (pg. 14)<br />
<br />
Here’s the problem. I understand where McCracken is coming from because, like him, I was raised in an evangelical world that taught against “the culture” and “the world.” It makes sense that McCracken would want to argue that there is value in culture. But McCracken doesn’t use the term culture. Instead he uses the phrase “pop culture.”<br />
<br />
<b>POP CULTURE</b><br />
<br />
If Christians in our generation
mean to be serious about reversing the withdrawal from culture that we
have experienced in both the fundamentalist and evangelical movements,
then we must first be aware of what culture is and the intellectual
history behind the idea. In order to be aware of what culture is, it is
important that we do not ignore the philosophical debate that has
shaped the meaning of the word over the last three centuries.
This debate grows apparent first by glancing at the two different
primary definitions of “culture” in our dictionaries.<br />
<br />
Worded
slightly differently in different dictionaries, if you were peruse the
different definitions of “culture,” you would find two main themes.<br />
<br />
First, you would find culture defined as “the set of values,
conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field,
activity, or societal characteristic” or “the customary beliefs, social
forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group” (<i>Merriam-Webster</i> online, 2013).<br />
<br />
Secondly, you would also find culture defined as “the act of developing
the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education” or
“enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and
aesthetic training” (<i>Merriam-Webster</i> online, 2013).<br />
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Now, if you were to look closer at the history of the word, you would find that the second definition is far older than the first. The older definition views culture, by definition, as something of value to be attained. It is not limited to any class or social group. It is accessible to anyone who makes the effort to cultivate it. It implies universal values in both the moral and aesthetic spheres. In contrast, the newer definition of culture does not presuppose any universal values at all. Instead, it regulates culture to the characteristics of one social group or class as distinguished from another.<br />
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As we will discuss further, McCracken relies upon the theologian, Kevin Vanhoozer, to explain some of his ideas. But Vanhoozer seems to prefer the newer definition to the old. In fact, in the book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Theology-Cultural-Interpret-Exegesis/dp/0801031672"><i>Everyday Theology</i></a>, Vanhoozer even claims that the newer definition of culture <i>is the older one</i>:<br />
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“One of the oldest and most influential definitions of culture is that of the first professor of anthropology, Edward Tylor, given in his 1871 work <i>Primitive Culture</i>. According to Tylor, culture is ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ Thus from anthropology we learn that culture is a way of life ...” (<i>Everyday Theology</i>, pg. 24.)<br />
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However, Dr. Samuel Johnson defined culture in his <b>1755</b> <i>A Dictionary of the English Language</i> as “The act of cultivation; tillage; the art of improvement and melioration.” Noah Webster defined culture in his <b>1828</b> Dictionary as “The application of labor or other means to improve good qualities in, or growth; as the culture of the mind; the culture of virtue ... Any labor or means employed for improvement, correction or growth.”<br />
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Vanhoozer has Tylor’s “oldest and most influential” definition in <b>1871</b>, more than an entire century after Dr. Johnson. And then, we must not neglect the very respectable <i>Century Unabridged Dictionary</i> from <b>1889</b>. Its section on “culture” reads as follows:<br />
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“The systematic improvement and refinement of the mind, especially of one’s own. [Not common before the nineteenth century, except with strong consciousness of the metaphor involved, though used in Latin by Cicero.] ... The result of mental cultivation, or the state of being cultivated; refinement or enlightenment; learning and taste; in a broad sense, civilization: as, a man of culture. (‘Rather to the pomp and ostentacion of their wit, then to the culture and profit of theyr mindes.’ - Sir Thomas More, <i>Works</i>, p. 14. ‘The culture and manurance of minds in youth hath such a forcible (though unseen) operation as hardly any length of time or contention of labour can countervail it afterwards.’ - Sir Francis Bacon, <i>Advancement of Learning</i> (Original [English ed.], <i>Works</i>, III. 415. ‘O Lord, if thou suffer not thy servant, that we may pray before thee, and thou give us seed unto our heart, and culture to our understanding, that there may come fruit of it, how shall each man live that is corrupt, who beareth the place of a man?’ - 2 <i>Esd.</i> viii. 6. ‘Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.’ - M. Arnold, <i>Literature and Dogma</i>, Pref.)”<br />
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In the history of the word, it was philosophers who criticized this old definition as elitist. Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg W.F. Hegel both did not like how the word implied universal values, so they argued that culture, instead of being something that is the striving for a higher standard, should just be what people already have. Both Herder and Hegel ended up consciously arguing to use the word “culture” differently so as to only mean a specific collection of characteristics belonging to a distinct social group. In one sense, they succeeded. Other philosophers began using the word in this way and now it is the sense in which we use it most. Now really only our adjective “cultured” still first reminds us of the older sense of the word.<br />
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Now, what is important here is that in order to use a phrase like “pop culture,” you have to use the newer definition of the word. And that is exactly what Kevin Vanhoozer does:<br />
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“Let us therefore define popular culture as ‘the shared environment, practices, and resources of everyday life,’ that is, the texts and trends that fill and frame our days and nights.” (pg. 28)<br />
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All this is a preliminary to thinking coherently about what culture means. Over time the phrase “high culture” has been used in order to distinguish the older definition from the more recent definition. And yet, another way that culture can possess great value, and a legitimate way in which the newer definition was useful to us, is to speak of “folk culture.” Folk culture has also been called “common culture” or even “low culture.” It is what is more popular to everyone, uneducated or educated. But it is specific to a particular community and place. Folk or common culture includes the local traditions, customs, conventions, legends and history of a distinct and local community. It can be agricultural, rural, regional or even national. Great works of art and great beauty has been produced, created and valued within folk culture. But the problem is this. <b>Today, folk cultures are dying. What used to be called folk culture, as local communities have progressively disintegrated, is now being replaced by what we call “pop culture.”</b><br />
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In other words, the phenomenon that we call “pop culture” is uniquely shaped by mass media and mass entertainment. It is the replacing of traditional folk songs uniquely belonging to the customs and ceremonies of a local community with mass commercially produced pop songs that everyone in every local community learns and listens to instead. It is the replacing of local forms of entertainment with electronic media entertainment, uniformly the same for all. It is the replacing of local styles of uniquely crafted cuisine with mass-produced artificially preserved and processed foods. Instead of locally run bakeries, breweries, restaurants, cafes, diners and pubs, it is the emergence of mass corporately run food-chains, where the food that is offered can be the same in every city or every country that you should happen to visit. There is a uniformity to “pop culture” that did not exist in “folk culture.” It makes more and more of us the same in our “personal” tastes, activities and consumption.<br />
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In fact, there is even another reason to distrust “pop culture” as distinguished from the older ideas of culture. Where does this line of reasoning take us? (1) “Pop culture” is the product of mass media and mass entertainment. (2) It includes rejection of universal values of the philosophers who changed the meaning of the word. (3) They changed the word to mean merely those collections of beliefs, tastes, customs, conventions and activities held by a group of people as distinguished from another group. This cuts out any implication of higher value from the word’s older meaning. Therefore, (4) “pop culture” is essentially that collection of beliefs, tastes, customs, conventions and activities that happen to be popular with the majority of massed consumers. In other words, “pop culture” loses much of the good still left in the newer definition of the word. Where culture could be understood to mean “folk culture” it was at least still tied to the traditions of local community. “Pop culture” does not even have that. In the world of pop culture, local community dissolves and melds into an indistinct and amorphous mass. Local family customs, regional traditions and community activity is replaced by a mass popularity that cuts across local place, time and tradition. <br />
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As distinct from “high culture” or from “folk culture,” <i>pop</i> culture is increasingly engaged with what, at the present moment, attracts the most popular attention. There are many ways to express the phenomenon. Pop culture is the replacing of local musicians with the radio. It is the replacing of local theater with the television. It is currently the replacing of local communal interaction with online social media.<br />
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Pop culture reduces high culture to a small educated elite, who intentionally neglect mass media in order to spend the time necessary to do the thinking necessary to educate themselves. Pop culture reduces folk culture to quaint marketing demographics and retro-fashions that have slowly grown more and more similar (and less and less tied to any local place) with each successive generation.<br />
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This is why, when McCracken says “it has been well established that Christians can find value in exploring secular pop culture” (pg. 14), his statement is, whether he has thought about it or not, set in the middle of philosophical debate. I fear he is focusing rather single-mindedly upon the meaning of “can find value” rather than in the meaning of “pop culture.”<br />
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It is not that I mean to accuse him of the inability to make any distinctions. For he does go to the trouble to distinguish. For instance, he writes that our “pop music culture has seen it all and - in the name of free speech - tolerated most of it.” (pg. 95) And blind or all-embracing tolerance of pop culture is not what McCracken is advocating for. He uses the content of some popular rap music to explain that there are moral grounds to occasionally object to the popular.<br />
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“Tyler and Odd Future regularly rap about rape, violence against women, drugs, and murder fantasies; they employ offensive language with nearly every lyric, using the <i>f-</i>word 204 times in the 73 minutes of Tyler’s 2011 album <i>Goblin</i>, for example.” (pgs. 95-96) “On the positive journey toward a wider appreciation of culture, Christians shouldn’t forget that - as Odd Future reminds us - not everything that is artistic, ‘real,’ or forward thinking is good for us. Discernment is necessary.” (pg. 97)<br />
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But allowing for the ability to make moral objections does not solve the problems caused by embracing pop culture. <br />
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Yes. Discernment <i>is</i> necessary. But we must not be too heavily influenced by the “capture the culture” rhetoric of the evangelical right. This is the unfortunate type of rhetoric that is in love with militaristic flourishes. Thus derives all the talk you’ll hear about “fighting the culture wars,” capturing the culture (as if it were an enemy citadel), or “engaging” the culture (as if one were firing broadsides at the enemy). If you have heard this sort of talk all your life, as I have, then without thinking about it, you’ll find this language slipping into your speech almost surreptitiously. This happens to McCracken and it is no surprise given that he’s been reading Kevin Vanhoozer.<br />
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McCracken writes:<br />
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“It is important for Christians<b> to engage culture</b> on its own terms and ‘go the extra hermeneutical mile to make sure they do not simply project their own interests onto cultural texts.’ But it’s also important for Christians not to be ‘helpless victims of popular culture’ but rather to ‘make their own cultural statements out of whatever the culture industries produce,’ something Kevin Vanhoozer eloquently champions ...Vanhoozer advocates an informed Christian cultural literacy in which Christians can locate within pop culture the elements that can be redeemed and <b>taken captive</b> for the cause of Christ.” (pg. 110, emphasis added.)<br />
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Now Mr. Vanhoozer is both a nice and very intelligent man. I have profited by his thinking on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, in reading his work, one still finds jarring juxtapositions between evangelical culture warfare rhetoric and lapses into academic jargon of the kind of which any postmodernist collegiate would be proud.<br />
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For instance, looking again at his essay published in <i>Everyday Theology</i>, one first reads that “Christians have increasingly become aware of the need to engage culture as part of Christian mission ...” (pg. 32) But then one finds Vanhoozer saying things like this: “Fortunately, a multilevel approach brings order into the plurality of possible methodological approaches by arranging hierarchically the various levels of complexity that characterize cultural reality.” (pg. 46) Or this: “In addition to the plurality of perspectives and levels, however, the Method is also multidimensional. To be precise, it situates cultural texts and trends in two distinct three-dimensional frameworks.” (pg. 48)<br />
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This sort of thing makes me uneasy because I worry that Vanhoozer has influenced McCracken and other Christian believers a little too far. McCracken tries his best to promote one of Vanhoozer’s more postmodernist streaks, but then as a consequence finds himself also being influenced by the French Jesuit cultural theorist, Michel de Certeau. Certeau is a separate essay subject in and of himself, but he is a perfect example of a Christian who attempted to debate the deconstructionists and postmodernists on their own terms, adopting much of their language in order to do so. The problem with adopting the language of the postmodernist is that you will inevitably find yourself in fatal epistemological quicksand. (Certeau, poor fellow, soon found himself trying to argue that “heterologies” were what ultimately explained life as the strategies of structures of power engaged in a war with the tactics of the subjugated so that everyday living is the process of poaching the social territories and power constructs of others. That way madness lies.)<br />
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McCracken explains that Vanhoozer “cites French cultural critic Michel de Certeau’s model of ‘poaching’ cultural texts - the idea that an audience can appropriate a text for its own purposes, transforming its meaning to better fit one’s own perspective or goal.” (pg. 110)<br />
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Now, the reader’s ability to “transform” the meaning of a text for his “own purposes” is a favorite trope of postmodern philosophy. In order to argue, as both McCracken and Vanhoozer seem to argue, that Christians can do it too, one has to first grant some epistemological ground. There are different schools of thought within Epistemology, and Christianity will not survive in any but one. The school of thought that argues that the meaning of a text can be “poached” or appropriated by a reader, viewer or consumer is to say something about the nature of meaning itself. Later in his book, McCracken writes:<br />
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“Michael de Certeau’s essay ‘Reading as Poaching’ is the classic apologia for the empowered consumer. In it, de Certeau suggests that consumers of culture should not think of themselves as doomed to passivity, beholden to whatever <i>telos</i> of meaning (or vision of the good life) the producer intends ... In de Certeau’s view, the reader of cultural texts ‘invents in texts something different from what [the author] ‘intended.’ ... He combines their fragments and creates something unknown in the space organized by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings.’” (pgs. 256-257)<br />
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To his credit, at least he also adds:<br />
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“There are limits to ‘poaching.’ But where it’s appropriate, sensible, and informed by more than just a desire for a convenient sermon illustration, the savvy Christian consumer should consider how a misdirected cultural liturgy might be redirected toward a Christian <i>telos</i>.” (pg. 257)<br />
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So ... while I admire the ends for which McCracken is aiming, but I would caution every thinking Christian to avoid the sort of postmodern epistemology that argues that the reader can make a text with one meaning mean whatever meaning he or she really wishes it meant. <b>A text does not change its meaning merely because the reader wants it to.</b> This is not something new. Today’s postmodernists are making the same outworn arguments about language and meaning that the heretical Nominalists of the Medieval Ages made. The nominalist/postmodernist epistemology, denying that words have the ability to mean things that exist objectively in reality (and therefore that the meaning of a text can change at a reader's whim), falls only before the solid ground of what, in philosophy, is called moderate realism.<br />
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Nominalist thinking withered under the cross-examination of Socrates in Plato’s <i>Euthyphro</i>. It disintegrated when subjected to the works of Aristotle (read, for example, his <i>Sophistical Refutations</i>). St. Thomas Aquinas found himself obligated to repeatedly deal it death blows as he found other Medieval theologians attracted to it. But instead of turning this book review into an essay about meaning and universals, I'll just strongly recommend the book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Center-Confronting-Evangelical-Accommodation/dp/1581345682"><i>Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times</i></a>, in which Millard J. Erickson, Justin Taylor, D.A. Carson and others make the argument that adopting or “poaching” any of the epistemological ideas of postmodernism leaves any Christian claim to any objective truth groundless.<br />
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<i>“A perfect judge will read each work of wit<br />With the same spirit that its author writ.”</i></div>
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<b>- Alexander Pope</b></div>
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Kevin Vanhoozer is more intelligent than I. He’s a theologian who knows his stuff and I’m just a layman. I have found his warnings against “reducing theology into mere cultural anthropology” both important and informative. But whenever he starts trying to appropriate or poach the ideas of a philosopher like Paul Ricoeur, he loses solid ground to stand on.<br />
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At one point, Vanhoozer explains that discourse “happens when someone uses some medium to say or show something. Ricoeur analyzes discourse further in terms of ‘a hierarchy of subordinate acts distributed on three levels’ (1) ‘locution,’ or act of saying something, (2) ‘illocution,’ or act of doing something in saying something, and (3) ‘perlocutation,’ or what we do by saying something ...” (44-45) And then: “Understanding cultural discourse demands a thick description of what has been wrought, and this is best accomplished with the aid of those speech act categories (viz., locution, illocution, perlocution) that enable a thick description of the act of discourse.” (<i>Everyday Theology</i>, pg. 46.)<br />
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The problem arises because one of the reasons Ricoeur made up all these new definitions in the first place is so that he can have them contradict each other. Eventually you get the sort of thing where Smith the Academic performs the act of lucuting A, in order to illocute B in lucuting A, while also simultaneously perlocutating <i>not A.</i><br />
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One suspects that academics may have a use for that sort of thing. But if you spend too much of your time reading it, something in the brain starts gumming up your ability to express straightforward ideas and then you’ll start writing sentences like “To be precise, it situates cultural texts and trends in two distinct three-dimensional frameworks.” <br />
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The argument for trying to make the best of a bad job out of “pop culture” lost me with Herder and Hegel’s arguments against the old definition of culture. From a tactical point of view, perhaps our objectives for working in culture would be best served instead by reviving the old sense of the word and standing on the more traditional ground of Dr. Johnson, Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot’s arguments about the value of culture. When we can still do that, why go to the trouble of “poaching” nonsense and then trying to make it Christian? This is exactly what McCracken warns against in other places in his book.<br />
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<b>PROBLEM:</b> Should conservatives or Christians simply advocate for the good that can be found in “pop culture” without addressing what<i> it</i> is, as distinguished from “culture” or “folk culture”? No. There is no need to give ground on this merely because some “folk” or “high” culture can be found mixed inside the mass of “pop” culture. Neither is there a need to begin adopting postmodernist cultural interpretation. For anyone interested in restoring the strength of local community or in debunking postmodernist assumptions, these are distinctions worth making.<br />
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Joseph Devlin, apparently with a Screwtapian smile, wrote that “For instance, you may not want to call a spade a spade. You may prefer to call it a spatulous device for abrading the surface of the soil.” Plutarch thought otherwise. <i>Ten skafen skafen legontas.</i><br />
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This brings us next to the distinction between high and low culture.<br />
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<b>HIGH CULTURE AND LOW CULTURE</b><br />
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There is another importance difference between the older and newer senses of the word <i>culture</i>.<br />
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McCracken writes:<br />
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“In his book <i>Art Needs No Justification</i>, Hans Rookmaaker suggests that the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art ultimately causes all art to suffer:<br />
‘High art has shunned all practical demands, such as decoration, entertainment or in fact any role that might smack of involvement in real life. Yet this type of art inevitably attracts almost everybody who has some talent ... But inevitably the ‘low’ arts have suffered also. They become the ‘popular’ arts, sometimes called ‘commercial.’ It is art in the service of Mammon. As all genuinely talented people tend to shun this field, its quality has deteriorated, and too often what is produced lacks all imagination or quality.’<br />
I agree with Rookmaaker that this division has unfortunately produced a needlessly simplistic binary, pitting the ‘commercial’ against the ‘artistic,’ as if something cannot ever be both.” (pg. 173)<br />
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But McCracken doesn’t explain how he imagines this division between “high” and “low” to have occurred. Even his Rookmaaker quote does not really criticize the distinction itself. Instead, it explains one reason <i>why</i> “high” art attracts those who are interested in producing quality and <i>why</i> “low” arts do not. After reading McCracken, I cannot imagine how the act of distinguishing between “high art” and “low art” is supposed to have caused this. Instead, they just seem to be the names we use to label them. Pitting the commercial against the artistic is useful for the very reason that serious artists often avoid careers devoted to making, oh say, commercials. One doubts they avoid doing so because someone somewhere one day decided to label commercials as “low art.”<br />
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No. It’s not that something can never be <i>both</i> commercialized and artistic at the same time. The point is what <i>being commercialized</i> can often do to a work of art. <b>Commercialization is something that really happens to art, and it rarely ever helps improve quality. </b> Taking McCracken’s music example, the list of highly talented and innovative musical artists who have had their careers wasted by commercialization is long and tragic. Even Elvis Presley was convinced later in his life that he had sold out by allowing his career to be controlled by movie roles and songs written for him by other people. Commercialization, far too often, means the loss of quality or musical integrity for the sake of mass production and catering to popular demand.<br />
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You can see this in popular bands whose music, according to many serious music critics, deteriorated in direct corrolation to their commercialization. (See Genesis, Jefferson Airplane, Kings of Leon, Kiss, Metallica and Nickelback.) Most recently, I’d argue that you can also see this in Rap and Hip Hop. Unlike American blues and jazz, which kept much of its integrity without its best artists changing their style for the sake of marketing statistics, <a href="http://nvate.com/7585/hiphop-commercialization/">American Hip Hop may be one of the musical genres that has suffered the most from mass commercialization</a>. The Black Eyed Peas, Lil Wayne, OutKast, Puff Daddy, Run-D.M.C. and Snoop Dog are all gifted artists with real talent. Arguably, all of their music at the beginning of their careers is so much better than their music now because they allowed commercialization to change their music. (The same phenomenon has also happened, even more recently, to Indie Rock.) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Where-Have-Good-Times-Gone/dp/1843540657/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=">That commercialization has really affected the quality of music is not even really in question.</a><br />
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This doesn’t always happen with everyone. Jermaine Cole (J. Cole), Lauryn Hill, Nasir Jones (Nas) and Kanye West have all conspicuously refused to change their music so that it would sell better. Others like Bobby McFerrin have refused multiple product endorsements. <i>The Doors</i> refused to allow their music to be used for commercial advertising. <i>Pearl Jam</i> refused to make music videos and set a ceiling for their ticket prices. Mark Hollis and his English rock band, <i>Talk Talk</i>, kept the sound they wanted when pressured to change and probably threw away commercial success because of it. Other musicians like Barbara Dane and Christy Paige have rejected different forms of commercialized success in order to try to preserve their freedom to create quality music outside of popular demand.<br />
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Generally, we use the phrase, <i>high culture</i>, to refer to the older ideas of culture and the phrase,<i> low culture</i>, to refer to that which is based on popularity rather than quality.<br />
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McCracken offers what he argues is a different way of thinking about this distinction:<br />
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“I’d like to reimagine ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture not in terms of their old stereotypes ... but in terms of how high or low something takes us in the upward path toward sublime epiphany. In this way, high and low would look more like this:<br />
High culture: That which reaches for greater heights of transcendence and truth, seeking to reveal - often in pleasurable and entertaining fashion - beauty and goodness honestly and with excellence. Pays attention to craft, believes in meaning, and exudes humility.<br />
Low culture: That which hovers closer to the base or surface, incurious and uninterested in truly wrestling with truth or achieving the sublime/transcendent. It is indulgent and undisciplined, more interested in esoteric obfuscation than true discovery.<br />
In this new understanding, a work of art could be considered high culture even if viewed by millions on YouTube each week.” (pg. 174)<br />
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What is unclear is why McCracken thinks that this way of putting it is new. Anything that is a part of old “high” culture - Mozart, Rembrandt, Dostoevsky, Bernini, Tarkovsky - would not cease to be what it is if it were viewed on YouTube by millions. That’s not the problem. The problem is that sort of thing is simply not viewed on YouTube by millions. Prioritizing high quality and that which is of high value is already commonly advocated for by those who have argued for high culture (Arnold, Eliot, Scruton). Prioritizing self-indulgence and gratification is what has already been referred to as “low culture.” No respectable critic or student of aesthetics really argues to popularity is a standard of value. On the contrary, in order to advocate for the unpopular against the popular, one has to reject mere popularity as a measuring standard. And once one does that, one could never argue against something merely because it was popular. Turning the logical fallacy, <i>argumentum ad populum</i>, upside down does not make it cease to be a fallacy.<br />
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McCracken attempts to apply another distinction in pop culture’s favor with the help of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He writes: “One of the tensions that has long informed Christian critique of culture is that of God’s immanence vs. transcendence. Is God present here, in all things, infusing even culture with his goodness (‘God in all’)? Or is he distant from the fallen things below, a ‘wholly other’ Being whose character does not manifest in the cultural works of sinful, estranged humanity (‘God above all’)?” (pgs. 97-98)<br />
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But are there really respectable Christian theologians who have argued that God is “wholly other” and completely outside of culture? McCracken suggests that “Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, for example, favored the ‘transcendent’ view and thus rejected most popular culture as being a thoroughly secular impediment to spiritual growth.” (pg. 98)<br />
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Yet it is difficult to understand how Tillich’s writing could be described as “rejection” of culture. After all, he is the theologian who wrote: “Religion as ultimate concern is the meaning-giving substance of culture, and culture is the totality of forms in which the basic concern of religion expresses itself. In abbreviation: religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion. Such a consideration definitely prevents the establishment of a dualism of religion and culture.” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Theology-Culture-Galaxy-Books-Tillich/dp/0195007115"><i>Theology of Culture</i></a>, pg. 42.) Speaking of how the church influenced education in the past, Tillich also wrote: “The reality into which generation after generation were inducted was the Christian Church, or more precisely, the ‘<i>corpus Christianum</i>,’ the ‘body Christian,’ which embraced religion, politics, and culture. The soul of this body, namely, the spirit of medieval Christianity, was present and exercised educational functions on every level of man’s individual and social life.” (<i>Theology of Culture</i>, pg. 148) This is the same theologian who argued against being unaware of other culture outside one’s own immediate experience, something that he attacked as “intellectual and spiritual provincialism.” (<i>Theology of Culture</i>, pgs. 159-176.)<br />
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At the same time, McCracken contrasts Tillich with the rich theology of Balthasar, claiming that on “the ‘immanent’ side, an example might be Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had a more positive view of human creativity and culture and felt that it could stir up a yearning in humans for God.” (pg. 98) Whether this contradicts Tillich is doubtful. I still need to read more of Balthasar myself, but from what I have read of Balthasar’s writing on culture, there has never been any reason to equate what he meant by “culture” with what is, today, now called Pop.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>In fact, Balthasar wrote: “The Christian [does not] need to leave his center in Christ in order to mediate him to the world, to understand his relation to the world, to build a bridge between revelation and nature, philosophy and theology ... This is what the saints are fully aware of. They never at any moment leave their center in Christ ... When they philosophize, they do so as Christians, which means as believers, as theologians.” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Explorations-Theology-Vol-Word-Flesh/dp/0898702658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386031518&sr=8-1&keywords=Explorations+in+Theology%2C+Vol.+1"><i>Explorations in Theology, Vol. 1</i></a>, pg. 195.)<br />
<br />
Bridge building between revelation and nature or between philosophy and theology is not the sort of thing you are going to find in the world of mass media entertainment. This is because philosophizing is not considered by anyone as entertainment.<br />
<br />
Another thinker who has written about both Tillich and Balthasar is Alister McGrath. On Tillich McGrath wrote: “His theological agenda can be summarized as an attempt to correlate culture and faith in such a way that ‘faith need not be unacceptable to contemporary culture and contemporary culture need not be unacceptable to faith.’” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Theology-Introduction-History-Christian/dp/0470672862"><i>Historical Theology</i></a>, pg. 194) On Balthasar, he wrote: “Von Balthasar’s chief work, published over the period 1961-9, is entitled <i>The Glory of the Lord</i>. It sets out the idea of Christianity as a response to God’s self-revelation, laying special emphasis upon the notion of faith as a response to the vision of the beauty of the Lord. His analysis of theology in terms of contemplation of the good, the beautiful, and the true has won many admirers.” (<i>Historical Theology</i>, pgs. 194-195.)<br />
<br />
Contemplation and cultivation of the good, the beautiful and the true excludes a large amount of “pop culture.” Contemplation and cultivation of the good, the beautiful and the true is, by definition, what “high culture” is.<br />
<br />
It is without distinguishing between culture and pop culture that McCracken is able to claim that Balthasar’s view “... seems to be the perspective of more and more evangelical Christians, who perhaps were raised with a view closer to the ‘pop culture is a spiritual impediment’ approach but have come to favor a more sacramental view of reality.” (pg. 98)<br />
<br />
<b>PROBLEM: </b> Should conservatives or Christians surrender advocacy for high culture on the grounds that <i>pop culture</i> is, well ... what is <i>popular</i>? No. With the depth of thinking that a large number of theologians and philosophers have already done for us on this subject, the high culture advocate has been provided with a diversified and wonderful number of captivating examples for use in his rhetorical arsenal. There is no good reason for us dismiss what is called “high culture” as unworthy, elitist or outdated. Neither is there any good reason to try to redefine it.<br />
<br />
But I do happily commend Mr. McCracken for asking if God's revelation can be found <i>in</i> culture. And this leads to the next subject that he explores that is worth looking at closely.<br />
<br />
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<b>GENERAL REVELATION</b><br />
<br />
This would be the doctrine of general revelation. While any thinker who is like-minded with McCracken should be pleased that he mentions it, I can't help the desire to press and encourage him onwards and upwards, deeper into the grounds that provide the foundation for this doctrine.<br />
<br />
McCracken writes:<br />
<br />
“More and more Christians seem to advocate the idea that, as one blogging pastor put it, ‘All truth is inspired by the Holy Spirit no matter where it is found.’ Because God reigns over all things and has dominion over all creation, who’s to say we can’t find redeemable goodness, truth, or beauty in a Jay-Z or Ben Folds song? Does it even make sense to talk about the ‘sacred’ as opposed to the ‘secular’?” (pg. 98)<br />
<br />
More and more Christians? This is a very old idea at the heart of
Christian theology. I respectfully submit that Mr. McCracken can do
much better here than “one blogging pastor.” In fact, this is another
point on which there has been a wealth of theological thinking for over
two thousand years. It’s rather an important one, after all. In fact,
it is ultimately the doctrine of general revelation that destroys both
legalism and cultural separatism in the end. I would also respectfully
submit that asking whether we can find goodness, truth or beauty in
Jay-Z or Ben Folds is the least of our worries. The modern day Church
is in far greater danger of avoiding, forsaking and remaining completely ignorant
of such fields as philosophy, science, literature, the arts, psychology,
history, feminism, natural theology, political philosophy, cultural
studies, classical studies and many other highly respectable fields of
learning inherent in human culture.<br />
<br />
In the grand scheme of
things, the Church’s lack of engagement with pop culture is only surface
level. We have pastors and teachers in the Church, who, on the same
grounds that they would reject Jay-Z or Ben Folds for being secular,
also reject the likes of Plato or Aristotle. So let’s pay attention to
the whole of the iceberg occupying enormous depths underneath the
surface.<br />
<br />
The deeper problem in the lack of “engagement with
culture” is not the Church’s inability to engage with whatever the
passing fads or fashions of popular entertainment happen to be at any
given moment. When there is a lack of “engagement with culture”, it is
ultimately a lack of discourse with the very movers and shakers of our
civilization. It is an abandonment of the life of the mind. Too many
Christians are ignorant of culture in the deeper and older sense. And
they are often ignorant because of a legalistic point of view that
rejects whatever is considered secular, pagan or “worldly.”<br />
<br />
Now, I
will grant that where we place our emphasis on this point is a matter
of means rather than of ends. I agree with McCracken’s ultimate aims
here. But I’d submit that many Christians, who have been taught the
false dichotomy that concerns McCracken, are always going to struggle to
find the enthusiasm necessary to repair their theology if the first
alleged examples of “secular” truth, goodness or beauty held out to them
are pop songs or TV shows.<br />
<br />
Saint Irenaeus wrote in the Second
Century that the things of God are shown by “means of the world” and by
“the formation of man,” and argued that “even the creation reveals Him
who formed it, and the very work made suggests Him who made it, and the
world manifests Him who ordered it.” Therefore, a large amount of
divine truth was known “by the prophets of God, while the very heathen
learned it from creation itself.” Also in the Second Century, Justin
Martyr wrote that the pagan poets, artists and philosophers could “see
realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in
them,” and for this reason, “whatever things were rightly said among all
men are the property of us Christians.” (Russell D. Moore, “Natural
Revelation,” <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Theology-Church-Daniel-L-Akin/dp/080542640X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386126198&sr=1-1&keywords=a+theology+for+the+church"><i>A Theology for the Church</i></a>,
pgs. 88-93.) In other words, all truth, even in secular or pagan
thought, is a part of God’s general revelation to mankind. To claim
that secular thought possesses no value is to deny the doctrine of
general revelation.<br />
<br />
Some of McCracken’s thinking on this subject seems to have been influenced by Abraham Kuyper:<br />
<br />
“This
way of thinking has drawn upon, in part, the works of Dutch Reformed
theologian Abraham Kuyper, who denied a sacred-secular dichotomy and
argued that Christians should not separate from but rather should engage
all areas of culture ... Kuyper is increasingly popular among
Christians today because of his strong affirmation of the ‘cultural
mandate’ for Christians to work, create, and develop culture to exhibit
the glory of God.” (pgs. 98-99)<br />
<br />
Again, <i>Pop Culture</i> is the most effervescent and capricious of all “areas” of culture. Is it one area worth engaging? Sure. It’s <i>one</i>.<br />
<br />
But
Kuyper is from the late Nineteenth Century and he was a rather
hard-core Calvinist. Calvinists had the advantage of avoiding much of
the cultural separatism that could be found in other Christian
denominations, but they also had the disadvantage of occasionally being a
little too aggressive in their attempts to use political power to
impose their views of Biblical standards of behavior on society.
Kuyper’s “cultural mandate” <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_mandate">interpretation of Genesis 1:28</a>
may have encouraged a little overly enthusiastic religious political activism
instead of normal involvement. (The cultural mandate was explained by
Kuyper in the “Stone Lectures” in 1898. Kuyper
declared: “That in spite of all worldly opposition, God’s holy
ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in
the state for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the
conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and
creation bear witness, until the nation bears homage again to him.”)
Whether making statements like this is likely to advance anything culturally is another matter. This sort of thing <a href="http://firstthings.com/blogs/evangel/2011/11/what-the-cultural-mandate-is-not/">is too easily taken to extremes</a> and has been happily embraced by <a href="http://www.colsoncenter.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/18317?spMailingID=2378956&spUserID=OTQ0MjI1NTIxS0&spJobID=34513742&spReportId=MzQ1MTM3NDIS1">evangelicals who were not Calvinist</a>, but who were sometimes strongly interested in fighting the culture wars.. Ultimately, Kuyper’s view of general revelation is <a href="http://seanmortenson.com/?p=120">only one denominational strand</a> within Christianity.<br />
<br />
“But
he’s also popular because of his thoughts on ‘common grace,’ the idea
that by God’s grace there is residual good in the world (beyond the
‘particular grace’ of salvation) that infuses all things and causes even
unregenerate humanity to potentially grasp the truth and reflect the
glory of God ... The concept is similar to Calvin’s notion of <i>sensus divinitatis</i>
(a sense of the divine), the idea that God implanted an inherent
understanding of himself in each person, which complements the
revelation of creation in which God ‘speaks to us everywhere.’” (pg. 99)<br />
<br />
Perhaps
it is mainly a stylistic thing. Calvinists are not uncomfortable
referring to unregenerate humanity and explaining distinctions that
allow them to refer to the special privileges of the elect over everyone
else. “... there is still quite a bit of distance between those who
exist solely with common grace (everyone) and those who have both common
and special grace (Christians).” (pg. 100) But McCracken doesn’t <i>have to</i> rely on 19th Century Neo-Calvinism to support the older view that general revelation can be found in culture.<br />
<br />
McCracken
quoted a blogging pastor who said that “All truth is inspired by the
Holy Spirit no matter where it is found.” Clement of Alexandria wrote
that a “spark” of divine knowledge was given even to the pagan
philosophers. He specifically commended Pythagoras and Plato for wisdom
that he argued could only have come from God.<br />
<br />
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Church Historian and Professorial Fellow in Classics at the University of Melbourne, Eric Osborn, described Clement’s teaching as follows:<br />
<br />
“The love of truth was a theme of Justin, who found it in the <i>Apology</i> of Plato. If we want a central point on which to hang the relation of Clement and Plato, it is the love of truth ... God is the cause of all good things, some principally and others as a consequence or corollary (I.5.28.2). He is the cause principally of the Old and New Testaments and the cause, as a corollary, of Greek philosophy.” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Clement-Alexandria-Eric-Osborn/dp/0521090814"><i>Clement of Alexandria</i></a>, pg. 157.) “Just as Paul does not disparage the Old Testament, says Clement, so he also regards philosophy as valuable ... God’s plan included the pagans, to whom God gave philosophy as well as the sun, moon and stars to be a path by which they might ascend to God. Hence God may justly judge pagans (6.14.110.3). From the universal providence of the divine <i>logos</i>, some have chosen to join themselves to the <i>logos</i> and be perfected by faith. Faith is common to all who choose to follow the universal <i>logos</i> (7.2.8).” (<i>Clement of Alexandria</i>, pg. 165.)<br />
<br />
Leader of the Oxford Movement and eventual Catholic theologian, John Henry Newman, argued that “‘we must confess, on the authority of the Bible itself, that all knowledge of religion is from Him, and not only that which the Bible has transmitted to us.” On the basis of the Alexandrian theology of the second and third centuries, Newman called the content of such natural knowledge of God “the Dispensation of Paganism.” The form of that knowledge, however, was tradition, or, as Newman was prepared to call it (and in italics at that), “<i>the divinity of Traditionary Religion</i>.” (Jaroslav Pelikan, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vindication-Tradition-Jefferson-Lecture-Humanities/dp/0300036388/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386133391&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Vindication+of+tradition"><i>The Vindication of Tradition</i></a>, 1983, pg. 31.)<br />
<br />
C.S. Lewis wrote: “Theology, while saying that a special illumination has been vouchsafed to Christians and (earlier) to Jews, also says that there is some divine illumination vouchsafed to all men. The Divine light, we are told, “lighteth every man.” We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story - the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth.” (“Is Theology Poetry?,” November 6, 1944, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Weight-Glory-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060653205/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386133433&sr=1-1&keywords=the+weight+of+glory+and+other+addresses"><i>The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses</i></a>, 1975, pg. 98.)<br />
<br />
Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan has written extensively on the interaction of Greek philosophy and the development of doctrine in the Christian Church. In his first volume of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Tradition-Development-Doctrine-Emergence/dp/0226653714/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386133490&sr=1-1&keywords=the+christian+tradition+pelikan"><i>The Christian Tradition</i></a>, Pelikan explains how important the doctrine of general revelation became for apologists in the early centuries of Christianity:<br />
<br />
“The reason for this importance was that Christ had been “known in part even by Socrates.” As the apologists came to grips with the defenders of paganism, they were compelled to acknowledge that Christianity and its ancestor, Judaism, did not have a monopoly on either the moral or the doctrinal teachings whose superiority Christian apologetics was seeking to demonstrate. To some extent this acknowledgment was a tacit admission of the presence within Christian thought of doctrines borrowed from Greek philosophy. To account for the presence of such teachings in pagan philosophy, the apologists drew upon several devices.” (<i>The Christian Tradition, Vol. I</i>, 1971, pg. 31.)<br />
<br />
“Justin sought to draw a connection between the philosophers and the preexistent <i>Logos</i>. It was the seed of reason in man which enabled pagan thinkers like Socrates to see dimly what came to be clearly seen through the revelation of the <i>Logos</i> in the person of Jesus. As the <i>Logos</i> had been adumbrated in various ways during the history of Israel, so also what paganism had learned about God and about the good life could be traced to the universal functioning of the <i>Logos</i>. The Stoics, the poets, and the historians all ‘spoke well in proportion to the share [they] had of the seminal <i>Logos</i>.’” (<i>The Christian Tradition, Vol. I</i>, 1971, pg. 32.)<br />
<br />
Ultimately, this idea that truth can also be found outside Scripture and outside the Church is fundamental to the teaching of Christianity. With this history, how can any thinking Christian resolve to withdraw or to separate himself from culture? With this Christian tradition in our inheritance, why would any pastor or leader avoid anything merely on the grounds that it was secular? According to such diverse thinkers St. Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis and yes, even Abraham Kuyper, God’s truth can be found even among “pagans.” Indeed, many of the truths that we possess originate from the general revelation that non-Christians have explored and studied and explained for us. To ignore it is to regulate oneself to an inexcusable level of theological and intellectual poverty.<br />
<br />
McCracken later sums this up: “It’s the idea that Christ illuminates and animates all things, that our enjoyment of culture is both justified and amplified by his incarnation, and that ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ are reductive categories that inhibit our ability to behold the goodness, truth, and beauty that exists by God’s grace.” (pgs. 254-255)<br />
<br />
Precisely.<br />
<br />
<b>PROBLEM:</b> (1) Ought Christian believers to avoid anything merely on the grounds that it is secular or pagan? No. That is not the same as avoiding that which is untrue or morally wrong. Such avoidance is bad theology and contrary to the doctrine of general revelation. (2) Ought Christians to follow a “cultural mandate” to “fill the earth” by capturing the culture according to Genesis 1:28? Not necessarily. The “dominion mandate” analogy can be taken too far and interpreting the verse that way is tenuous. Besides, dividing grace neatly into “common grace” (which belongs to both Christians and nonbelievers) and “special grace” (which belongs only to Christians) neglects the fact that some truth, goodness and beauty is to be found <i>outside</i> the church.<br />
<br />
Finally, with the third part of this series, we will wrap this up by exploring McCracken’s discussion of Consumerism, Church Subculture and Entertainment.J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-24537805434287191522013-11-25T17:30:00.000-08:002014-02-25T19:13:22.422-08:00Reflections on Being an Army Veteran in the 21st Century<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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_____________________________________</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>“What life to lead and where to go<br />After the War, after the War?<br />We'd often talked this way before.<br />But I still see the brazier glow<br />That April night, still feel the smoke<br />And stifling pungency of burning coke.<br />I'd thought: ‘A cottage in the hills,<br />North Wales, a cottage full of books,<br />Pictures and brass and cosy nooks<br />And comfortable broad window-sills,<br />Flowers in the garden, walls all white.<br />I'd live there peacefully and dream and write.’ ...”</i></div>
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<b>- Robert Graves, 1916</b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”</i></div>
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<b>- T.E. Lawrence, 1920</b></div>
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_____________________________________<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><b>(Note: This meandering and rather lengthy essay is
written primarily to my fellow alumni from Patrick Henry College. It
was produced by request for the November 2013 Issue of the Patrick Henry
College Alumni Newsletter. The editor who honored me with the request
said that the word count did not matter. His primary mistake was that
he rather carelessly told this to a very undisciplined writer.
This is the first time I’ve ever written or said anything officially to
my fellow graduates and alumni. It is also only the second time that
I’ve written anything that discussed being in Iraq.)</b></span></i></div>
</div>
<br />
It still sounds strange for me to say this. I am a veteran of the Iraq war. I was deployed for one year, from 2006 to 2007, to active duty as a member of the U.S. Army Reserves. When I arrived in Iraq, the new government had just taken office and the insurgency was on the upswing. I was there right before the troop surge of 2007 and I was there at the time that Saddam Hussein was executed.<br />
<br />
I was proud to serve in the 298th Transportation Company, United States Army Reserves, with a number of brave and selfless men and women who I watched risk their lives daily and selflessly. When our gun truck platoon was told that it would be spending a year guarding and driving gasoline tankers up and down the country across the roads of Iraq, I watched my friends shrug it off with a sangfroid worthy of their American ancestry. It reminded me of a story I once heard William F. Buckley tell about a general, trying on one rare occasion, as officers sometimes awkwardly do, to make conversation with the enlisted men during a spit-‘n-polish inspection. “Why do you like to do such an insane thing like jumping out of an airplane?” he asked a nearby paratrooper. “Oh, <i>I </i>don’t like to, sir. I hate it every single jump. It scares the hell out of me,” the paratrooper replied. “Then why on earth do you do it?” The answer goes a long way to explaining how many veterans feel about each other. “I do it,” the paratrooper replied, “because I just like to be around the <i>sort</i> of people who like to jump out of airplanes.”<br />
<br />
It is now a running joke that, whenever asked by some new acquaintance who has discovered for the first time that I was in the war, I’ll answer by boasting I was given the distinct privilege of being shot at inside the city of Nineveh. But that isn’t quite true. The hostile city I experienced, which possessed a seemingly infinite number of enemy roadblocks making it a pain in the rear to drive through, was Mosul. Mosul is actually built upon the ancient ruins of Nineveh along the Tigris river. Jonah notwithstanding, if there is anything the people of that city have yet to “repent” of, it is their enthusiasm for making it extremely uncomfortable for any westerners who should dare to venture inside their walls.<br />
<br />
Our platoons took turns going out on missions. Some missions lasted for a couple hours. Some missions lasted for sixteen hours or more. It became so commonplace for IEDs to explode in or on the side of the road every single mission, that their blowing holes in the road just became humdrum routine. Eight times out of ten, they missed us. Once out ten, they would manage merely to send shrapnel through the tires of our vehicles. So I saw a little action over there. Yet my company and I were blessed. <i>We</i> all made it. I made some other friends outside my own company. A few of them went out on missions and never came back.<br />
<br />
It was the sort of thing we talked about - the possibility of not making it back. But it was too easy to reassure ourselves because of who we were and where we were from. We’d continually compare the action that we’d seen to the action that our fathers, uncles and grandfathers had seen. (I have one uncle who made it back from Vietnam and one great-uncle who didn’t. I am also very proud of the fact that both of my grandfathers served with distinction in the Pacific theater of WWII.) The “combat” we were experiencing in Iraq was nothing compared to what the men in past generations had seen and suffered through in other wars. How on earth could we complain about what we were seeing once we compared ourselves to them?<br />
<br />
I will never forget attending Patrick Henry College on September 11, 2001. The whole school shut down that day. All our classes were very solemn and full of continual prayer for weeks afterward. It was seared into our minds that we were now living in a new world, different from anything our country had ever experienced before. Grief was first above all else. But the next feeling was one of profound frustration. I had already resolved, as a matter of family tradition, to serve in the Army. But there is a strong sense in which, no matter how you are working in academics or politics, you can often feel like you aren’t doing anything that really matters. After graduating in the first graduating class, I walked off the platform in May of 2002 straight into boot camp. My degree at Patrick Henry helped secure my acceptance to George Mason University School of Law. I was never going to pursue a military career, but I was obligated, like so many of my historical heroes, to still participate in my generation’s war.<br />
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Neither will I forget the international relations and foreign policy classes I attended at PHC. It was at our school that I first thoroughly studied and learned how empires have risen and fallen over the course of history. It was at our school that I realized that there are lessons, even in the Peloponnesian War of the 400s BC, that still contain matters of great importance for us now. Because I attended our school, I knew when I trod the desert sands of Iraq that others who believed in the principles of Western Civilization had trod them before me. I experienced some unpleasantness there. But so did Xenophon and his fellow Greek hoplites, outnumbered by tens of thousands of Persians, after they held back their enemy in the Battle of Cunaxa and then, leaderless, had to fight their way over a thousand miles back to the Black Sea.<br />
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It makes being in a foreign land and fighting what seems like a confused war far more meaningful if you pay attention to military history. It turns out, I was fighting in merely one of a long series of conflicts between the East and the West. I was in the same troubled country that had once been conquered by Alexander the Great. The consequent Greco-Persian wars covered five decades. It was a land that was later part of the Parthian Empire, conquered by Rome, established as a province by Trajan, evacuated as a province by Hadrian, and conquered again by the Roman general, Lucius Verus. The Roman-Persian wars lasted for over seven centuries, as Roman legions did something very similar to what American troops were doing for the last decade. The Crusaders of the Medieval Ages fought in what are now the cities of Iraq. The Ottoman Empire was in conflict with the West for over six centuries. The British had to fight the Ottoman Central Powers there during World War I, and then they tried to keep order, often bungling it for which T.E. Lawrence so eloquently took them to task.<br />
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Western armies have entered the Middle East, defeated the enemy and then sat around superfluously until they eventually retreated over and over again. It is useless to criticize American involvement in the Middle East without studying this history. Asking why we were in Iraq is a question that cannot be satisfactorily answered without asking why East and West have been in conflict since antiquity.<br />
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My understanding of why I was there changed permanently when I made friends with an Iraqi. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call him Zaid instead of his real name. Zaid worked on a U.S. Army base, providing information regarding local cities to us despite death threats that had been made against him and his family. He told me about how excited he still was about voting in the last Iraqi parliamentary election. Al-Qaeda had threatened to attack the polling booths and then demonstrated that they were not bluffing, killing and bombing would-be voters standing in line across the country. Knowing that this was happening, Zaid and his wife stood in line waiting to vote for over four hours. When I asked him why, he gave me an answer that I will never forget: <i>“We have never NEVER had real elections before. We want to be different now and voting has changed us forever.”</i> In other words, for thousands of years, the people there have never before possessed self-government. Now, at least, they have a beginning.<br />
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But this isn’t to say that we should expect them to be just like us. <i>“We ought not to be surprised,”</i> wrote Russell Kirk, <i>“that men and nations resist desperately - often unreasoningly - any attempt to assimilate their character to that of some other body social. This resistance is the first law of their being, extending below the level of consciousness. There is one sure way to make a deadly enemy; and that is to propose to anyone, ‘Submit yourself to me, and I will improve your condition by relieving you from the burden of your peculiar identity and reconstituting your substance in my image.”</i> The East has a great richness of culture, art, religion and wisdom. Much of this historical richness has been destroyed by radical Islam, but we have to understand how influences from the West have been destroying it too.<br />
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Archie Roosevelt, in his 1988 book, For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer, wrote that in <i>“Baghdad and Tehran the charms of the old Islamic cities were losing the battle to the banalities of secondhand Western modernity.”</i> Roosevelt worked for years in the Middle East, and he described how in many cities there, <i>“hordes of automobiles, squeezed together by rush-hour jams and traffic lights”</i> had crowded out the very existence of local communities. Families were being broken apart as individual family members take <i>“employment as guards, taxi drivers, and members of the lower scale bureaucracy.”</i> A new technocratic elite is increasingly regulating the lives of local communities and families, and this kind of organization has been ushered in by Western influence. Commercialization is entering the Middle East. When I was there, I watched the number of McDonalds’s and Burger Kings that were setting up in Iraqi cities double in number. These are not necessary accoutrements to self-government.<br />
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One of the reasons I decided to serve in the U.S. military was because I learned at our school that it was precisely the military experience of some of our founding fathers that gave them insights into the reality of how government worked. Washington and Hamilton both had learned, firsthand, how the powers of a Confederate Congress worked when they attempted to obtain financial and logistical support for the army during the Revolutionary War. It is no coincidence that the institutions and limitations of our constitutional order was designed by many men who learned practical political lessons by their experience in war. You can even see it at the Constitutional Convention. The voices of those who only sat in political office during the war ring with a different tone in the debates than the more urgent voices of those who personally fought in the war.<br />
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So how, as a veteran, is my point of view now different?<br />
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I’d confess that, because of my experience, there are some ways in which my point of view should carry less weight. I’d also argue there are ways in which it should carry more.<br />
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In order that you may know how to take a veteran’s point of view cautiously, let’s first consider the disadvantages of being a veteran. There is a real sense in which life in the military is unhealthy for the soul. I didn’t go through any greatly tragic or searing experiences that many other of my fellow service members went through. I don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder. But those problems aside, military life and war still influence the participant unhealthily. In the training process, mentally you have to steel yourself against feeling. After experiencing a combat environment where you could endanger the lives of your friends by making even one single tiny mistake, after living in a state of constant vigilance and lack of security every day for a year, you develop mental habits that are not always going to be desirable in civilian life.<br />
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I believe in the faculty of free will and I believe influences do not impare one’s will. I am still morally culpable for every choice that I’ve made. But that does not change the fact that, since my military service, I now lack empathy in a way that I didn’t before. Empathy is one of the basic requirements for close personal relationships, but my experience has roughened (or corroded) my ability to relate to others as Christianity teaches I ought. This is an advantage in emergencies. Everyone else around me can be upset, stressed out or even shouting, and I will stay utterly calm, ready to act with ruthless efficiency despite the feelings in the room. It is often a disadvantage at being a human being. My personal relationships with friends and family have suffered because of this. There was, for example, a lovely young lady that I was growing closer to before I left for Iraq. It sounds too dramatic to say that the deployment changed who I was. The alterations were often small, gradual and subtle. But I grew less empathetic, more callous, and even more coarse, towards her. She noticed and rightly drew away.<br />
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My faults are my own, but I can also see how being a veteran has decreased my own personal responsibility. When you live for an extended period of time doing a job that is literally a matter of life and death, when you have watched other people at the very moment when they deliberately try to kill you, when you have ducked so as not to be torn in half by gunfire, it is often very difficult to view other less demanding things in life as priorities. I now work in the law. There is occasionally a “crisis” at my office concerning what we’ll call the filing of paperwork. I simply cannot feel any sense of urgency about paperwork. I happily work hard at things. I’m willing to commit to finishing things. But the excitement or the adrenaline rush I used to feel in accomplishing simple workday tasks under pressure is now gone. I’ve talked to other veteran friends and they’ve said they share this same problem. Basic adult responsibilities have been neglected in my life as a result of this attitude. If you happen to know other veterans who have seen combat, understanding this about them will do much to your understanding why they sometimes act the way they do.<br />
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The worst thing about it is that, if you’re not paying attention to it, the way wartime experience can influence you is easily unnoticed. I was unconscious of how much empathy with others I had lost until I was able to look back, years later, at how I have talked and acted since returning home. Once I was back, I hurt another young lady because I only dated her out of what can be described as starvation for feminine company. I also spent a couple years where I became obsessed with what I was sure was the loss of masculinity in our culture outside military life. I even despised some of my other friends for being weak or effeminate because they cared and worried over things that I, in my own pride, dismissed as unimportant. Other fellow veterans I know have similar experiences. They are still the same guys I knew before they went to war, but it is also as if they lost a part of themselves.<br />
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This is not to say that unhealthy influences cannot be resisted or overcome. I am learning now to show charity where my military training taught me to show none. I am understanding now to consciously pay attention to how other persons feel, even when I may think the problem doesn’t demand feeling. I am only now forcing myself, after six years, to treat some basic adult responsibilities with the importance they deserve. I can’t help asking myself “what if?” What if I didn’t serve in the army during the war? Would I already be married and raising a family? Wouldn’t I be much further progressed in my career? Wouldn’t I have resisted that callousness that I am so ashamed of having shown to others who needed me? But these questions are both unanswerable and unhelpful. The more relevant question is, starting over, would I still have volunteered to serve? Yes, I would have. It was simply a matter of duty, the costs be what they may. Compared to others, the price I have paid is as nothing.<br />
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I’ve reminisced here over what are, to me, some very personal questions because I believe it can help those of you who have friends or family members who are veterans. There are habits of thought that affect us. We view life problems through the lens of our experience. For veterans, struggling with some of these attitudes is common. But there are many who have succeeding at resisting worse influences better than I. There are many who are more loving and empathetic than I. And, there are many who have seen and experienced far worse than I.<br />
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Nonetheless, there are some advantages of perspective that I believe veterans also share in common. There is something to be said to having a strong sense of what does and doesn’t matter. I appreciate little things that I always took for granted before - cheap hot coffee on a cold dark morning, the bright summer stars, the feeling of a very slight breeze on a sun beaten day, the love that can be demonstrated by the smallest of common acts, a human smile in the face of disaster, the shelter of a roof, the warmth of a fire, the mere presence of a woman, the imagination in a book, the laughter and trustfulness of a child, the nurturing act of feminine care in a situation most men would ignore, the silence that exists away from motorized industry, the air when it doesn’t smell of burning or stink or gasoline, the time that is wasting away at every little movement of a clock’s second hand. There are so many blessings I wasn’t aware of and that I used to give no thought to.<br />
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Another advantage to military experience is how it forces you to reckon with certain realities. No amount of idealism or abstract theorizing will take away the very concrete reality of bullets, explosives or the consequences of the exercise of political power. Maybe it’s tea party or libertarian influence, but these days I am hearing far too much spineless talk among conservatives, and even some fellow alumni, that is flippantly casual, dismissive and almost contemptuous for America’s starting up the Iraq War. It’s embarrassing, both selfish and cowardly sounding, and, quite frankly, flirting with a 1780s-style isolationism that seems willfully blind to the historical age in which we now live. We must be very careful not to follow the popular or the trendy even within our own circles. Criticizing military interventionism is trendy right now. Dismissing the war in Iraq as just an expensive extravagance that Bush and Cheney engineered out of lies is both overly simplistic and naive.<br />
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The existence of military superpowers in world history have derived certain responsibilities. To deny these responsibilities is immoral. The United States can either forsake the responsibilities that the existence of power creates or it can, unlike some other historical empires, tie a commitment to the right along with the exercise of our power - so as to ensure that we stand against the ancient and destructive lie that might makes right. Criticize the methods or specific instances of the use of military power by all means. We ought to hold ourselves to a high standard. But it is plain ignorance to criticize the use of military power itself. After personally witnessing the lives of innocent people destroyed by evil men, I can heartily declare that the use of military power is a necessity for good men in a fallen world.<br />
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Moreover, every combat veteran has seen, firsthand, the human costs that derive from either political or religious extremism. As a result, we have a strong distaste for radicalism and extremism in all of its forms, no matter whether it is from a collectivist left or a religious right. Extremism in the defense of liberty is a vice. Moderation in the pursuit all things, justice included, is a virtue. The devil discovered long ago, that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Evil, remember, is not self-existent. All evil is some good twisted or taken to excess. It is no coincidence that one of the first and greatest of advocates for moderation as a virtue was Socrates, a veteran of the heavy infantry in the Greek phalanxes of the Battle of Potidaea. Neither is it a coincidence that one of the conservative heroes of antiquity was the military veteran, Cincinnatus.<br />
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We dearly need our political rhetoric today to be tempered by both classical and Christian forms of moderation. Today, politics is in a state of increased polarization and transition. Our country is, in a sense, at a crossroads. There is one path we can take that will cast away many of the things our ancestors have long loved and cherished. There is another path we can take that is neither the path of ideological purity nor of reactionary insistence upon turning back the clock. We must distinguish. Generally speaking, the odds are, if you happen to be in your twenties or thirties, that you are either liberal or libertarian. The odds are, if you happen to be a military veteran in your twenties or thirties, that you are conservative. The conservative naturally ought to avoid extremes. The conservative is also very aware of the practical realities required of accomplishing tasks in a complex and broken system.<br />
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I worry about this even among my fellow PHC alumni. It seems that we now have semi-regular controversies and loosely organized protests criticizing our school. During the last one involving Dr. Baskerville’s lecture, I heard and read a few responses that were, to put it kindly, thoughtless, angry and bordering on the hysterical. I strongly disagreed with a number of Dr. Baskerville’s assertions. But we must think practically. We graduated from a college that receives a majority of its financial support from what is still an organized and politically active religious right. Making extreme statements has always been an unfortunate rhetorical device of some prominent members of the religious right. It should be no surprise to us then, when some professors who are a part of this tradition, occasionally say things that should not be uttered (particularly in front of a camera). We must not, however, respond in kind.<br />
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What are some of the concrete realities that the Patrick Henry Alumni currently have to accept? Traditionally, alumni have exerted significant influence and control over their schools. But, we are not there yet. When William F. Buckley, Jr. published <i>God and Man at Yale</i> in 1951, he was making a plea to his fellow alumni <i>because</i> the Yale alumni provided a large percentage of Yale’s financial support and almost all of Yale’s Board of Directors were alumni. If we believe in our school and if we have successful careers, we can begin achieving this. But until we are directly responsible for a significant amount of the college’s financial resources, it is unrealistic to assume that we can exert much of an influence on the administration of the college.<br />
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One of the most important questions for our alma mater is whether it will ultimately be only a product of the evangelical religious right. If it is, then there are expectations that will have to be tempered. If it is not, then there may be things our college will be able to accomplish outside of any ideologically enclosed bubble. One of the reasons I chose to attend PHC was because I was impressed by Michael Farris fighting James Dobson on the Religious Liberty Protection Act of 1998. That was one instance of the sort of intelligent and reasoned advocacy that I still wish to see more often in the public square.<br />
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As both a military veteran and an ally of the religious right, I support many of the same causes that they do. As a Christian, I hold firmly to some basic principles of government. As a conservative, I believe we have some of the same political battles ahead of us. I do not, however, have any interest in contributing to protests against PHC resulting in bad publicity that will accomplish no concrete objectives.<br />
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In my experience in being a part of the greatest and most efficient military in the world, I have still witnessed incredible incompetence, ignorance and wastes of resources. These things happen. I have also witnessed protests and complaints made without the power or influence necessary to accomplish real world goals. In order to do real good, you have to act tactically, at the right time and in choosing the right battles. We must never make our freedom from control of the college administration an opportunity to publically voice any disillusionment we may now feel with either our school or with current politics.<br />
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I’ve always found “the Clevers” very amusing when John, in <i>The Pilgrim’s Regress</i> by C.S. Lewis, discovers them speaking the language of protest and “freedom of thought”:<br />
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<i>“... ‘It is the expression of a savage disillusionment,’ said someone else.<br />‘Reality has broken down, said a fat boy who had drunk a great deal of medicine and was lying flat on his back, smiling happily.<br />‘Our art must be brutal,’ said Glugly’s nurse.<br />‘We lost our ideals when there was a war in this country,’ said a very young Clever, ‘they were ground out of us in the mud and the flood and the blood. That is why we have to be so stark and brutal.’<br />‘But, look here,’ cried John, ‘that war was years ago. It was your fathers who were in it: and they are all settled down and living ordinary lives.’<br />‘Puritanian! Bourgeois!’ cried the Clevers ...”</i><br />
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Let’s not be like them.<br />
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After being in the war, I dream, just like Robert Graves described in his poem, “Over the Brazier,” of settling down and living peacefully the ordinary life that we all can still be blessed with in this country. I refuse to allow extreme political rhetoric from either side to disillusion me. I continue to be, in spite of my experience in the military, something of a romantic. There are so many things in life that don’t matter and that are not worth fighting about. And this is so because there really are some things to <i>do</i> matter and that are <i>still</i> worth fighting for.<br />
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If you want to explore a good and healthy point of view from a veteran’s perspective, let me warmly recommend the recent novel, <i>In Sunlight and In Shadow</i> by Mark Helprin. Helprin himself is a veteran. In the book, he has a character, who just recently returned from fighting in World War II, argue against how some people talk as if war and extremism were grounds for disillusionment with those things we used to believe in:<br />
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<i>“People like that always want to show you that they’re wise and worldly, having been disillusioned, and they mock things that humanity has come to love, things that people like me - who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing - have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard ... The deeper I fell, the more I suffered, and the more I saw ... This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell. How shall I treat it? Love of God, love of a woman, love of a child - what else is there?”</i><br />
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Being disillusioned with what has been rather banally described as “traditional family values,” or being disillusioned with our constitutional system of government, with politics, with our country’s place as the world’s military superpower, with conservatism or with our college will not help accomplish any good.<br />
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And, just so we’re clear, I am not above being susceptible to any of these kinds of disillusionment myself. Neither do I pretend to have any special claim for anyone’s attention merely because I am a veteran. My service in the military helped me as much as it hurt me. I am both better off and worse off because of it. I do not deserve any special treatment for what I did. The fact is merely that my wartime experience has deepened my understanding of some things, but that experience derived merely from doing what I ought to have done - nothing particularly noteworthy. <i>Justitia nihil expetit praemii.</i><br />
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And yet, I have seen many of my fellow service members who have suffered. In our dismissive and increasingly cynical and ironic culture, I have also seen them disrespected and dismissed. This is why I believe military service is worth honoring. <i>“For,”</i> as C.S. Lewis wrote, <i>“let us make no mistake. All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil - every evil except dishonour and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it.”</i>J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-23646374421820872332013-11-03T16:38:00.001-08:002014-02-25T19:12:50.618-08:00On Houses Divided vs. Houses That Need Cleaning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On October 28, 2013, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/node/362303/print">Ramesh Ponnuru & Rich Lowry posted an essay over at <i>National Review</i></a> analyzing the fallout from this whole sordid government shutdown business. The essay is full of a number of well-timed common sense tactical observations. Summing it up, Lowry & Ponnuru strongly denounce the blind insistence upon ideological purity that leads to much strutting and fretting upon the media stage, but inevitably ends like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This essay is the sort of thing that conservatives are strangely somehow in great need of today. Over recent years, it has not been exactly clear just how many conservatives there are for whom the word “tactical” is included in their vocabulary.<br />
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It is quite refreshing that Lowry & Ponnuru do not mince words. The problem is basic: there is a kind of politics that ought to have no place in conservatism. Furthermore, this insight is not new. The government shutdown was only the most recent instance of what keeps happening when one particular faction of the Republican Party controls the leadership:<br />
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<i>“[The government shutdown] was the latest and most consequential expression of <b>an apocalyptic conservative politics</b>. It is a politics of perpetual intra-Republican denunciation. It focuses its fire on other conservatives as much as on liberals. It takes more satisfaction in a complete loss on supposed principle than in a partial victory, let alone in the mere avoidance of worse outcomes. It has only one tactic — raise the stakes, hope to lower the boom — and <b>treats any prudential disagreement with that tactic as a betrayal</b>. Adherents of this brand of conservative politics are investing considerable time, energy, and money in it, locking themselves in unending intra-party battle.” </i>[emphasis added]<i><br /></i><br />
Thus, strategically, the insistence upon ideological purity is one of the best plans for guaranteed failure. In the real world, refusal to compromise nets zero results. It also strips away all those who would have agreed with a primary position, merely because they aren’t interested in taking such a position all the way to its <i>nth</i>-most extreme. This shrinks what often is already a minority, burns bridges, and encourages the desertion of many natural allies from the ranks.<br />
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<i>“An emphasis on purity — even when defined essentially by matters of style and attitude rather than policy views — has too often kept such allies out of power. It has led Republican primary voters on several occasions to choose candidates who lost races that mainstream conservatives would likely have won. William F. Buckley Jr. said that conservatives should support the rightwardmost viable candidate, with viability understood to include the ability to make the case for conservatism in a way voters will find compelling. For the purists, viability is an unacceptable compromise. Which leads us to such candidates as Sharron Angle ... National Review joined the purists in supporting Richard Mourdock in Indiana, too, and that turned out to be a mistake. Too many conservatives have not admitted it or drawn appropriate conclusions.”</i><br />
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Don't forget both Christine O’Donnell and Ken Buck (who all but gift-wrapped Senate seats for the Democrats). If conservatives are not careful, the 2014 elections (traditionally favorable to the party outside the White House) may cause more harm than good. <a href="http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2010/11/03/5403120-just-32-of-tea-party-candidates-win">There is evidence that has been piling up over the years</a> that Tea Party candidates who win in the primaries very often give up elections to the Democrats even in districts that have Republican majorities. This can only mean that there is something defective about certain types of candidates. (There are many who learned this long ago in elementary school.)<br />
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Lowry & Ponnuru’s warnings here are timely and much needed. There is currently a strategic problem among conservative leadership, and recent failure has been based upon some fundamentally false assumptions:<br />
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<i>“The key premise that has been guiding these conservatives, however, is mistaken. That premise is that the main reason conservatives have won so few elections and policy victories, especially recently, is a lack of ideological commitment and will among Republican politicians. A bigger problem than the insufficient conservatism of our leaders is the insufficient number of our followers. There aren’t enough conservative voters to elect enough officials to enact a conservative agenda in Washington, D.C. — or to sustain them in that project even if they were elected. <b>The challenge, fundamentally, isn’t a redoubling of ideological commitment, but more success at persuasion and at winning elections.</b>”</i> [emphasis added]<br />
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Unfortunately, Lowry & Ponnuru can’t even make common sense warnings of this sort without being attacked - and the attacks derive from within their own camp. On October 29th, <a href="http://www.redstate.com/2013/10/29/the-hungry-and-the-well-fed/">editor-in-chief of <i>RedState.com</i>, Erick Erickson, tore into <i>National Review</i> for even making this argument in the first place</a>. Unlike more traditional online conservative writers (see Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher or Alan Jacobs), Erickson appears to represent a new and popular brand of “conservative” that is currently more trendy these days over at CNN and FoxNews. <i>RedState.com</i> was launched in 2004. Erickson is also a radio talk-show host not known for temperance at, as Buckley used to say, “the rhetorical or bombastic level.” To see the rather disconcerting nature of his rhetoric, all you have to do is listen to Erickson actually talk for a couple minutes anywhere on the news or on youtube.<br />
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Mr. Erickson’s counterpoints to Lowry & Ponnuru's essay demonstrate a profound unfamiliarity with traditional conservative thought. He attempts to back up his first point by referring to Buckley’s 1955 mission statement for <i>National Review</i>, noting that Buckley “did not mention winning elections” and that, instead, Buckley encouraged “standing athwart history yelling stop.” First, it is not entirely clear if Mr. Erickson understands that Buckley’s language was intended to be taken metaphorically rather than literally. As one continues to read Mr. Erickson, one comes away from his writing with the distinct impression that actually “<i>yelling</i> stop” may be one of his preferred methods of debate over at <i>RedState.com</i>. Secondly, reading his attempt to argue that it is meaningful that Buckley did not mention winning elections in one notable column, one can only conclude either (a) that Mr. Erickson has not really read much of Buckley, or (b) that he decided to deliberately ignore what Buckley actually <i>did</i> say about winning elections.<br />
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When asked who are the best types of candidates that a conservative should support, Buckley replied: <i>“The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. If you could convince me that Barry Goldwater could win, I’d vote for him.”</i> (And, apparently at least <a href="http://www.redstate.com/barrypopik/2010/09/14/origin-of-the-buckley-rule-and-the-brand-new-limbaugh-rule/"><i>someone</i> over at <i>RedState.com</i> has heard of this rule before</a>.)<br />
<br />
The Goldwater example is, in fact, instructive. While Goldwater did garner the support of Buckley and <i>National Review</i> in the mid-1960s, the interesting story is <i>how</i> he was able to do so. At the time, supporting Goldwater was a matter of controversy over at <i>National Review</i>. William Rusher and Brent Bozell were among the first to support him. On the other hand, James Burnham and Buckley’s sister, Priscilla, did not <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/node/340485/print">and warned against the consequences of supporting him.</a> But Goldwater eventually gained the support of both Buckley and Russell Kirk before the Republican Primary by initially agreeing with them to distance himself from members of the John Birch Society. This agreement, however, did not last very long. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Buckley-William-Rise-American-Conservatism/dp/B00AKR15S4/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1383512283">Carl T. Bogus explains:</a><br />
<br />
<i>“In the end - and to his undoing - it was Barry Goldwater who accommodated himself to the John Birch Society. Some of his advisers begged him not to do it. Nevertheless, when he accepted his party’s nomination for president in July 1964, Goldwater stood before the Republican National Convention and declared, ‘I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.’ Cheers shook the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Goldwater had to wait more than forty seconds before he could deliver the companion line: ‘And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!’ The audience leaped to its feet. Everyone understood that Goldwater had just said that the John Birch Society was okay by him. Richard Nixon, who had introduced Goldwater, grabbed his wife Pat’s arm to keep her from rising with the crowd ...”</i><br />
<br />
This was ultimately disappointing for the crowd at <i>National Review</i>. Goldwater had disregarded the advice of both Buckley and Kirk, and this disregard contributed to his loss of the 1964 election. Burnham’s warnings about Goldwater had ultimately proved to be correct. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flying-High-Remembering-Barry-Goldwater/dp/0465008364/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1383512414">Reflecting on this later, Buckley wrote</a> bemusedly that “Goldwater had learned too late the lesson that one must guard against any use of a word which, for many, amounted to a call to immoral ends ... It was so in 1964 with the word ‘extremism.’ It could not be hygienically used in any affirmative context.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-William-F-Buckley-Jr/dp/1604732253">Also, when asked</a>, during another conversation about Goldwater, about which “failures of the conservative movement in the past ten to twenty years” most distressed him, Buckley answered that he understood the conservative argument <i>against</i> voting for Goldwater. However: <i>“In any case, that was not by any means my idea of the great disappointment of the sixties. That was the failure, on the whole, to verbalize more broadly, more convincingly, the conservative view of things. The conservative critique has been very well made, but it hasn’t got through with sufficient force to the opinion makers. It is still hard as hell to find a young conservative with writing talent. That distresses me deeply.”</i><br />
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In other words, according to Buckley, the conservative failure that the entire Goldwater episode demonstrated was one a failure of persuasion. Poor conservative persuasive skill is a direct result of ignoring practical considerations. Lack of self-restraint and associating oneself with extreme points of view detracts from one’s persuasive power. These are the considerations that Mr. Erickson completely misses. These same strategic considerations regarding candidates who cannot persuasively articulate the conservative position also equally apply to the tactics used by elected conservatives members of government. This is one of Lowry & Ponnuru’s most convincing critiques of the recent government shutdown:<br />
<br />
<i>“The defunding campaign was the legislative equivalent of the hopelessly ill-suited candidate — and, like many of those candidates, it drew support from people who see politics primarily in terms of purity, confrontation, and willpower. The contrast to the Democrats’ behavior in 2009 and 2010 is instructive. They were willing to muscle through a health-care bill even though the public opposed it, and even though some of them realized it would cost them seats. Republicans should have a similar commitment to better causes. But they should also note that Democrats used this maneuver only when they had the votes — large majorities in both houses of Congress, control of the White House — to pull it off. They did not take a large political risk while having no plausible way to gain a policy victory to show for the potential costs.”</i><br />
<br />
But Erickson dismisses National Review’s point here with contempt: <i>“Now, instead of standing athwart history yelling stop, National Review spends 3,591 words to tell conservatives to stop fighting until they win ... I await the well-fed editors apologizing for the Goldwater candidacy. At this point, it is only a matter of time.”</i> Making cheap shots like this ignores the lessons that conservatives learned from the Goldwater candidacy. For our purposes, the whole point is that the Goldwater campaign went off the rails, turning towards precisely the type of uncompromising rhetoric that Erickson supports.<br />
<br />
<i>“The truth,”</i> argues Erickson, <i>“is that Obamacare is deeply destructive and an assault on individual liberty. It should be fought by all means, with or without a Senate majority or White House. The fight should not depend on electoral outcomes and should not be delayed pending reinforcements, many of whom will flee the field once elected.”</i> But that’s just the problem, <i>who</i> wins the fight <i>does</i> depend on electoral outcomes. The reality is that conservatives have to return back to convincing the public of their positions or they will never advance any further conservative objectives. But Erickson doesn’t care:<br />
<br />
<i>“The present editors of National Review, over the last several years, have made it clearer and clearer that they now speak mostly for the well-fed right and not for conservatives hungering for a fight against the leviathan. They have made their peace with the New Deal ...”</i> But hungering for a fight isn’t enough. Mere opposition, without even the a minimal plan for success, will never reverse anything. Drawing a proper distinction between fighting now and living to fight another day is not making peace with the philosophical consequences of the New Deal.<br />
<br />
Erickson’s contempt contrasts sharply with <i>National Review</i>’s respect for the more energetic elements with in the Tea Party movement. Lowry & Ponnuru are happy to point out that the<i> “groups that pushed defunding play an important role in galvanizing grassroots sentiment. The insistence on conservative rigor can exercise a welcome influence in fights like the one over the farm bill, in which inertia and self-serving Republican politics are at their worst and many of the same groups that supported defunding urged a better, more reformist course. Their willingness to go out and fight is indispensable.”</i> And yet, a willingness for a fight alone isn’t enough. Effective politics means picking and choosing your battles. Some fights are unrealistic in a government specifically designed so as not to be shaped by sheer brute power.<br />
<br />
So how exactly is it that have we stopped caring about reality?<br />
<br />
<i>“Conservative groups that have internalized the apocalyptic view of politics believe the most effective model for gaining ground is simply pressuring Republicans to be more confrontational. The first step of the defunding strategy was not to persuade most Republicans that it was a good idea; it was to force them to go along with it whether or not they agreed. So the defunders prevented the majority of House Republicans, who disagreed, from being able to follow a different approach, and threatened to run primary opponents against some of them. Then they began to insist that Republicans who remained critical were dishonorably breaking the party’s (coerced) unity.”</i><br />
<br />
In fact, <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/10/paul-ryan-almost-unsung-hero/70658/">there is a whole other story here about how Ted Cruz and Rand Paul pushed past the more realistic options for working out real compromise that other conservatives like Paul Ryan were negotiating for</a>. Instead, when Republican leadership caved and stumbled, Paul Ryan was ignored and the <i>“defunders thus filled a vacuum — but filled it badly. And they did not supply what the leaders most woefully lacked. Neither group has promoted a free-market health-care plan of the kind that would have to be part of any plausible strategy to replace Obamacare.”</i><br />
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The editors of <i>National Review</i> are, in fact, pleading here against despair. The leaders that produced the government shutdown are implicitly acting, for all intents and purposes, as if winning elections are now beyond hope. Rushing to make stands against the inevitable without waiting for the right moment; insisting on votes before they have the opportunity to collect the necessary majority; demanding that the other side give in when the other side obviously can tell that you are bluffing ... all these maneuvers are the tactics of a mind-set that has given up on winning elections and persuading the electorate.<br />
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Consequently:<br />
<br />
<i>“There is no alternative to seeking to expand the conservative base beyond its present inadequate numbers and to win the votes of people who aren’t yet conservatives or are not yet conservatives on all issues. The defunders often said that those who predicted their failure were ‘defeatists.’ Yet it is they who have given in to despair. They are the ones who entertain the ideas that everything has gotten worse; that the last few decades of conservative thought and action have been for nothing; that engagement in politics as traditionally conceived is hopeless; that government programs, once begun, must corrupt the citizenry so that they can never be ended or reformed; that the country will soon be past the point of regeneration, if it is not there already.”</i><br />
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The only way that conservatives will enact legislation to reform health care, to reform the budget, to put in place a reasonable plan to decrease the debt, and to stop the incredible recent exponential growth of government spending, will be to put such legislation up to a vote. Need we really explain this any further? (To win a vote, you submit your legislation to a vote after you have collected enough votes to win. Refusing to do anything as blackmail in order to force the other side to give in accomplishes nothing. The refusing-to-do-anything-strategy has historically helped one political party to enact exactly no legislative reform whatsoever.)<br />
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<a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/10/for-prudence.php">Scott Johnson wrote</a> that “Erickson’s response illustrates one of the phenomena that Lowry and Ponnuru decry in Cruz’s leadership.” It almost appears as if Erickson doesn’t care if the conservatives win. If the point is to find a public spotlight in which to demonstrate one’s ideological purity, then Ted Cruz and the defunders’ strategy <i>was</i> successful. If the point is to eventually change Obamacare and/or replace it with a plan that is at least somewhat designed to account for Economic 101, then Erickson is not helping.<br />
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Not only is he not helping, but, considering the press coverage Erickson has been able to attract, he might as well be working against conservatives. The news of the last week has been of the “house divided against itself cannot stand” variety. <a href="http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/30/21247009-first-thoughts-the-four-years-war?lite">MSNBC was happy to report</a> that the “ideological civil war inside the Republican Party is well underway.” <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/10/29/the-war-on-rational-conservatism-ted-cruz-national-review/">Jonathan S. Tobin, at <i>Commentary Magazine</i></a>, enthusiastically explains that: <i>“Those parachuting into this debate from the outside will struggle mightily to see what the two sides disagree about in terms of principles or policies and will discover little evidence of any actual split on anything of importance. All participants oppose President Obama’s policies and ObamaCare. They’d like to see the president replaced by a conservative at the next presidential election and ObamaCare to be repealed. But that unity of purpose isn’t enough to prevent what is starting to take on the appearance of an all-out civil war within the ranks of the conservative movement.”</i><br />
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This is not what conservatives need right now, but Tobin may not be that far off from the truth. If enough conservatives are not paying attention, they will allow electable candidates to be replaced by mere core-base-pleasing unelectable candidates. The Democrats will then increase their majority in the Senate and even threaten a considerable number of seats in the House.<br />
<br />
<i>“It’s too soon to know for sure, but right now I’m starting to think that those inclined to pooh-pooh the chances for a genuine split are wrong. If that portion of the conservative base listens to Cruz and Erickson they are going to spend much of the next year trying to exact revenge on the senator’s critics. And if that means helping to knock off genuine conservatives like McConnell who will almost certainly be replaced in the Senate not by more Cruz clones but by liberal Democrats, they think it’s no great loss because such people are more interested in purifying the GOP than in beating the Democrats ... This drama will be played out in many states next year in the midterm elections, but it will come to a head in 2016 when a single formidable moderate conservative may possibly be opposed by a split field of right-wingers in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.”</i><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/winning-elections-good-how-will-republicans-do-it">Kevin Drum also informs us</a> that <i>“Moderate Republicans are no longer a real force. For better or worse, right wingers finally have the party they've always wanted — or at least as much of it as any faction is ever likely to get in real life.”</i> When prudence and moderation are signs of ideological treason, then both tactics and rhetoric are only going to grow more and more extreme. <i>National Review</i> is simply asking conservatives to be cautious and to start thinking about this.<br />
<br />
Drum remembers that when <i>“Democrats went through this kind of introspection in the 80s, the DLC, for better or worse, drove a conversation that included lots of painfully concrete ideas. That produced plenty of noxious infighting, but it also produced results. The same thing could happen in conservative circles. It would be fascinating to see National Review start to play the same kind of role on the right. That's unlikely, I suppose, but one way or another, they need to choose up sides. It's easy and obvious to say that Republicans need to win electoral victories if they want to promote the conservative cause. The bigger question is what Republicans need to do in order to win those victories. Tackling that question in a forthright way will make NR a lot more enemies, but it might, eventually, also produce some actual electoral victories.”</i><br />
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Arguably, there are some further deductions that can be made about the character of the readership of a website like <i>RedState.com</i> <a href="http://www.redstate.com/2013/10/29/the-hungry-and-the-well-fed/">from the comments that they post on the article’s webpage.</a> Mr. Erickson’s diatribe against <i>National Review</i> has so far garnered many supporting comments such as the following:<br />
<br />
- <i>“Either you choose principles as a foundation and suffer the slings and arrow of public sentiment, or you become a weathervane of political expediency, bending with the winds to survive, but never actually changing the direction of anything else.”</i><br />
- <i>“Had the NR come out early in support of a true conservative like Santorum or Bachmann, there's no telling how many minds could have been changed going into the 12 election.”</i><br />
- <i>“I have had it with the New World Order, statist, progressive Bush family and hope they stop trying to ‘globalize’ this country.”</i><br />
- <i>“I want to get us to the promised land. God bless Red State for overtaking NR as the true voice of conservatism.”</i><br />
- <i>“The only common ground the Democrats want is on the edge of a cliff, so they can push us off and presumably come tumbling after. To bargain with them is a death pact.”</i><br />
- <i>“Moderates wouldn't be bad allies, if they could just learn to take directions.”</i><br />
- <i>“The zombies know but one direction and they can not do anything but walk ahead bite, kill and consume their prey.”</i><br />
- <i>“It will take time (40 yrs. or 400) and constant struggle but we will reach the "promised land" because conservatism promotes a life God wants us to live.”</i><br />
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Of course, not all the comments were positive. After a few commenters dared to disagree with Mr. Erickson, one of his supporters commented: <i>“This is a great post! What amazes me though is that it seems Redstate.com has becoming a hangout for the GOP establishment types based on many comments I see. So sad. What happened here at Redstate Erick???”</i> To which Mr. Erickson responded: <i>“It's crap and makes it easier for people to troll in bad faith. We're working to change it.”</i><br />
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In the face of so much unreason and one-sidedness, it is difficult to find much more to say. <i>“Scorn prudence,”</i> Lowry & Ponnuru warn us, <i>“and you can justify any course of action so long as you approve its ends.”</i> Even, it necessarily follows, courses of action destined for utter and complete failure.<br />
<br />
I can only assume that Mr. Erickson and his readers have neither read nor profited by the conservative tradition of prudence and moderation long advocated for by the best of conservative thinkers in political history. At this point, I can only plead with all conservatives to re-read and re-think through admonitions and warnings like the following:<br />
<br />
Edmund Burke:<br />
<i>“If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper and moderate on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.”</i><br />
<br />
Alexander Hamilton:<br />
<i>“So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy.”</i><br />
<br />
Eric Voegelin:<br />
<i>“In classic and Christian ethics the first of the moral virtues is sophia or prudentia, because without adequate understanding of the structure of society, including the conditio humana, moral action with rational co-ordination of means and ends is hardly possible. In the Gnostic dream world, on the other hand, non-recognition of reality is the first principle.”</i><br />
<br />
T.S. Eliot:<br />
<i>“But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-effects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom.”</i><br />
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Russell Kirk:<br />
<i>“Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.”</i><br />
<br />
David Foster Wallace:<br />
<i>“It’s known that the vastly increased popularity of talk radio over the past decade coincides with the growth and mobilization of the GOP’s right wing, with the proliferation of partisan media, with the alliance of neoconservatism and evangelical Christianity, and with what seems like the overnight disappearance of restraint, tolerance, and civility - even a pretense of mutual respect - in US political discourse.”</i><br />
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Peter Berkowitz:<i><br />“The virtue of political moderation is often mistaken for a compromise with virtue, a softening of belief, a diluting of passion, a weakening of will, even an outright vice. But those are examples not of political moderation but of the failure to achieve it. Moderation in politics is not a retreat from the fullness of life but an embrace of it. Political moderation is called into action by the awareness of the variety of enduring moral and political principles; the substantial limits on what we can know and how effectively and justly we can act; the range of legitimate individual interests; the multiplicity of valuable human undertakings and ends; and the quest to discern a common good in light of which we can make moral distinctions and establish political priorities ... Nevertheless, the virtue of political moderation will always serve as an inviting target for demagogues who seek to exploit the passion for purity in politics.”</i><br />
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In his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Intellectual-Movement-America-Since/dp/1882926129/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid="><i>The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945</i></a>, historian George H. Nash discussed how Buckley’s coalition consciously made itself broad enough to incorporate alliances between different conservative schools of thought in order to accomplish the goals they held in common. This “fusionism” was what made their success possible.<br />
<br />
Nash explains:<br />
<br />
<i>“Perhaps they had tired of factional feuding: more likely they were increasingly cognizant of the need to avoid either quixotic antistatism or morose authoritarianism if their movement was to capture national power and respect ... If ‘fusion’ implied practical collaboration with others who angles of vision did not coincide with one’s own, most conservatives were clearly fusionists in this sense by the mid-1960s or even earlier.”</i><br />
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This is what modern conservatives still need today. Nash notes that this “fusionism” included the rejection of any ideologically closed systems. <i>“Moreover, [Frank] Meyer and other conservatives never tried of stressing that conservatism was not an ideology, complete with sacred tests or a Fourteen Points. It was part of the wisdom and genius of conservatism that it did not try to encapsulate all its beliefs in a handbook of doctrines.”</i><br />
<br />
It is difficult to stress just how very important this is. <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/29/us-usa-fiscal-ryan-idUSBRE99S10A20131029">Reuters reports</a> that Paul “Ryan will be his party's leader on the budget negotiating panel that
sprang from [October]'s deal to end a federal government shutdown and
avert a potential default.” If the conservatives in the Republican Party follow examples of intelligent leadership that men like Ryan have already proved they are able to provide, then a compromise between both parties will be likely. Some limits will be able to be set. Limits that are not set can then become further issues of debate for the upcoming elections. That is one of the advantages of compromises. It frames further concrete plans of reform for public attention.<br />
<br />
We must not denounce or show contempt for those like Lowry & Ponnuru who call for serious evaluation of the possible. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible. We must not support those like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul or Erick Erickson whenever they call for extreme absolute positions of no compromise. Doing that exhibits a casual disdain of even the possibility of victory. Willful ignorance, pretense or grandstanding will not persuade anyone over to the other side. Instead, conservatives need to appeal to reason. They need to explain in concrete terms the alternatives that they have to offer and why such alternatives will help us. And then, they need to produce electable candidates who will back these concrete alternatives.<br />
<br />
For any conservatives who can't be bothered to read history books anymore, Steven Spielberg's recent film, <i>Lincoln</i>, provides us with an instructive historical lesson on the limits of ideological purity. The abolitionists existed and strove energetically for almost an entire century without accomplishing concrete goals in the real world. This had something to do with their absolute uncompromising demands for everything all at once. They remained so ideologically pure that they were stuck fighting a constant rearguard action. In the meantime, the number of slaves in America increased rapidly. It took a prudent and careful compromising mastermind like Lincoln to abolish slavery in the real world. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that he was willing to head in the right direction only by taking one small step at a time.<br />
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Absolute repeal of the Affordable Care Act will never happen without enough votes. Absolute defunding of the Affordable Care Act will never happen without enough votes. As a matter of fact, even a partial and moderate repeal is highly unlikely without winning a rather important election in 2016. However, real compromises hammered out in order to begin the decrease of the National Debt, to begin to privatize a few portions of the Healthcare System, budget cuts and entitlement reform (a little here and a little there) - all these things <i>are</i> possible with a conservative leadership that is willing to do something other meeting matters of ideological satisfaction.<br />
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Conservatives need not bother themselves about fighting some internal civil war within their own house just yet. As vocal as he may be, I'm not convinced that Erickson represents a great enough number to obstruct real conservative objectives at every turn. But, if we are not yet a house divided, we certainly do seem to have some real house cleaning that needs to be done. It may just be that the recent exhibition that Cruz and his adherents just made of themselves last month will serve to wake up enough conservatives to the exigencies of political strategy. The first order of business will include gently pushing aside those demagogues who try to exploit that passion for purity that can only spectacularly fail as a corollary to neglecting the virtues of prudence and moderation.J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-15110436740203500982013-10-27T11:02:00.002-07:002014-02-02T10:54:38.528-08:00GRAY MATTERS (2013) - by Brett McCracken (book review, Part I)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“Cultured Christians don’t rush to judgment. They don’t look at something fancy on a menu and say, ‘No thanks. I’ll go with what I know!’ They don’t walk out of a difficult, complex film saying, ‘I didn’t get it. What a waste of my time.’ They understand that good things in culture rarely lend themselves to immediate and easy understanding. It takes time, effort, the development of taste, and a patient sensibility to get the most out of culture.”<br />
- <b>Brett McCracken</b>, pgs. 18-19<br />
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“The evidence of scripture, tradition, and experience all suggest that art can sometimes mediate not only a sense of life but also a sense of grace and of the mystery that we call God. And since art cannot mediate without the aid of aesthetic imagination, response, and judgment - without taste, in short - we must consider the perhaps surprising possibility that taste at its most encompassing is no less crucial to religious life and faith than is intellectual understanding and moral commitment.”<br />
- <b>Frank Burch Brown</b>, pg. 125<br />
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The most striking thing that makes Brett McCracken’s second book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Matters-Brett-McCracken/dp/0801014743/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><i>Gray Matters: Navigating The Space Between Legalism & Liberty</i></a>, so interesting is his refreshingly creative approach to the question of legalism. The Modern Church doesn’t so much <i>have</i> a problem with legalism anymore (except in fringe corners). On the contrary, the Church now seems to have a much more serious problem of <i>overreacting against</i> it. No one likes the old positions of the legalist in our now unabashedly open and tolerant society. It is currently purely a matter of course for younger believers to despise, and marshal their arguments against, the close-minded and out-of-touch fundamentalist. Legalism just has all these rules, you see, and, well, they're unduly restrictive of liberty. Christianity isn’t, after all, about rules anymore; it’s all (so they tell us) about ... <i>relationship</i>.<br />
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Much rarer is the theologically grounded member of the Church who can still, with both a healthy confidence in the inerrancy of Scripture and a competent proficiency in the elementary rules of hermeneutics, demonstrate how erroneous are the Scriptural interpretations of the legalist. Such articulate advocates do exist. And, unless you happen to be anti-intellectual, conservatism does not equal legalism. After rudimentary study and consideration, any half-competent first-year Bible college student can show the obvious arguments against the basic prejudices of legalism. Scripture does not forbid the drinking of wine, beer or even of hard liquor. Scripture does not forbid the speaking of “uncouth” words. Scripture does not forbid listening to particular genres of musical notation. Scripture does not forbid the activity of dancing. Scripture does not forbid walking into a movie theater. Scripture does not forbid critical thinking. Etc. etc. etc.<br />
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That these arguments even have had to be made is informative, if not of the doctrines of Christianity itself, at least of a particular historically limited bias or waywardness in applied Scriptural interpretation. But Mr. McCracken has not here really marshaled the Scriptural evidence against the more embarrassing errors American fundamentalist legalism. Others have already done this before. This is not the book in which to find those ever so exhaustive lists of Scripture passages in favor of drinking or giving examples of the cussing habits of King David, the prophet Elijah or the apostle Paul. To our benefit, McCracken has taken an entirely different and rather more provocative approach.<br />
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His approach is, I think, superior to those who merely argue against the common fundamentalist misinterpretations of Scripture. It is, instead, a focus upon the question of culture - a healthy focus that many in the modern church still avoid (even if they reject legalism). Ultimately, the legalist/libertine debates are really about culture, and McCracken understands this. The consequence is that <i>Gray Matters</i> is a uniquely curious book in that it could only have been written by one who was raised within American Evangelicalism. Yet that itself is not a criticism. I also was raised in the world of American Evangelicalism. I understand that it is not easy to divest oneself of naturally resulting overreactions. “Will we,” asks McCracken, “be apathetic separatists who cede appreciation of culture to ‘the world’? Will we, as another extreme, be uncritical and careless in our accepting of any and every bit of culture at our disposal?” (pg. 129)<br />
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Many in our generation completely reject Evangelicalism and live a lifestyle single-mindedly devoted to <i>not</i> being Evangelical. And then there are still others I know who accept the bubble-like strictures of their historically limited upbringing. The former way reacts against how we’ve been taught. The latter reacts against those who react against how we’ve been taught. McCracken’s book offers something different. “Christians have for too long been motivated by <i>reactions</i> to the errors and excesses of the generations before ... Let’s grow up. Let’s stop compensating for the wrong-headed approaches to culture that our Christian forebears might have had.” (pg. 240)<br />
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<b>1 - ON SEPARATION FROM CULTURE</b><br />
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The most obvious wrong-headedness still to be found in many American churches today is the dismissal of culture altogether. According to this form of church teaching, which is by its nature at the very root of legalism, the “culture” is merely something for Christians to engage, to capture, to avoid, to separate from, to evangelize, to make their own or to fight against. “The” culture is considered something that is always changing (in contrast, of course, to the unchanging Bible). It is the lifestyle of the world - the products of which are considered to be in opposition to the Gospel.<br />
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Indeed, I have personally heard so many sermons contrasting “the gospel” as something inherently distinct from “the culture” or “the world” that I now could, mindlessly and without any preparation whatsoever, get up and preach this sermon, simply listing and repeating all the clichés and warnings against culture with which Evangelical and Post-Evangelical churches are now so familiar. (Some churchgoers have speculated as to whether it is actually possible for a pastor to preach a sermon and to take a nap simultaneously. If it is possible, the sermon that distinguishes the gospel from the culture and the world is probably the perfect naptime sermon.) The result, as McCracken discusses while using jazz and rock music as examples, is rather embarrassing.<br />
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“Anti-jazz magazine articles popped up with titles like ‘The Jazz Problem’ or ‘Unspeakable Jazz Must Go,’ the latter being a 1921 critique in <i>Ladies’ Home Journal</i> in which clergy and everyday citizens decried the perils of this popular new music form. Jazz is ‘worse than the saloon,’ one person remarked. It is ‘simply rotten. It belongs in the underworld.’ The instruments’ broken, jerky rhythms have a ‘sensual appeal’ that ‘call[s] out the low and rowdy instinct,’ making youth act ‘in a restless and rowdy manner.’” (pgs. 76-77)<br />
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“One of the charges against rock that got a lot of traction during the Cold War was the notion that rock ‘n’ roll was a communist weapon to undermine the character of America’s youth. Leading this charge was David A. Noebel, longtime Christian crusader against pop culture who kicked off a rather illustrious career with the 1965 pamphlet ‘Communism, Hypnotism and The Beatles,’ followed by the 1966 tome <i>Rhythm, Riots and Revolution</i>, a sizeable book in which dubious experts and ‘scientists’ (with names like ‘Dr. Freedom’) support the thesis that Communists used rock music to destroy the mental and emotional stability of America’s youth.” (pg. 78)<br />
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It is therefore a pleasure to read McCracken’s healthy opposition to this mindset in the church. For those of us uninterested in following legalistic forms of thought, “the” culture is not something to avoid or to be afraid of. It is not something opposed to the gospel. It is not something that ought to be removed from the order of Christian life and being. On the contrary, we ought ourselves to be “cultured.” Culture is a pursuit and endeavor worthy of the believer. It is a part of civilization, a necessary institution deriving from the nature of man, and therefore ultimately a part of general revelation. Thinking in this older and more traditional way results in a different kind of living. “Cultured Christians,” McCracken admonishes the reader, “don’t pit their Christianity in oppositions to culture or understand their faith as being uninformed or uninfluenced by culture. They avoid looking at things in terms of sacred/secular dichotomies, recognizing that common grace lends dignity to all manner of cultural activity ... Cultured Christians are not pendulum people. They aren’t always reacting against some bad iteration of the faith by going too far in the other direction.” (pg. 19)<br />
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Because McCracken is a film reviewer, he is uniquely suited to using cinema as an example in this discussion. In his experience within Evangelicalism, he has seen Christians reject films based upon their rejection of “the” culture. He argues, and I heartily agree with him, that intentional cultural illiteracy is a poor witness for Christianity. It’s not that we cannot reject things in our society. There is an appropriate time to reject particular films or popular trends, fashions or fads. But to do so based upon a rejection of the culture itself is merely ignorance. “One can be thoughtful, quiet, well-informed, and - if asked - articulate in their reasoning to not see a film. Or one can be legalistic, loud, defensive, and simpleminded in their abstinence. In the latter case - a Christian refusing to see Harry Potter because it ‘promotes witchcraft,’ perhaps - the witness is a bad one for Christianity.” (pg. 166) Such a lack of perspective presents a Christian faith unworthy of any nonbeliever’s consideration - a Christian faith that is, moreover, outside the bounds of traditional and historical Christian orthodoxy.<br />
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That these things are even necessary to explain is unfortunate. But in the context of much of modern church teaching, they are preliminaries required in order to pursue the topics of legalism and freedom with further depth.<br />
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<b>2 - ON REFUSING TO THINK</b><br />
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But there is another kind of wrong-headedness here, and that is the refusal of many Christians to actually think. If you've spent any time attending the church, you'll know what I mean. Many Christians actually <i>resist</i> thought. The hard work and challenge that it takes to think difficult questions through is rejected in favor of the trite, the easy and the sloganeering.<br />
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“How many times have you heard something say, ‘Oh no, is this one of those <i>thinking</i> movies?’ I wince every time I hear it. Is having to think during a movie really such a bad thing? It doesn’t have to feel like going to the dentist. On the contrary, being able to think critically while watching a film can enhance rather than detract from the pleasures of the experience.” (pg. 177)<br />
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Thus, a second preliminary that it is refreshing to find a member of my generation actually articulate is the theologically grounded refutation of the anti-intellectual bias when it comes to Christians’ relation to culture. Again, film is an instructive example. Evangelicals’ abandonment of culture has, effectually, meant the abandonment of the Arts and Humanities. Regardless of what anyone else is doing, we ought not to be living shallow and mostly thoughtless lives. At very the heart of the Arts and Humanities is the idea that works of art and literature can reflect truths about our condition and, by showing us such truths, change us as persons for the better.<br />
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“So often we blaze through life, moving from temporary enjoyment to temporary enjoyment, haphazardly consuming things so that none of it ever grows us in any significant way. But I know we can be better. And I know that if we take the time to really dig in and do the work of being the best consumers of culture we can be, it will not only enhance our faith and witness but also glorify God. He’s the source of everything good, after all, and he makes everything good taste, sound, look, and feel all the more magnificent.” (pg. 23)<br />
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A proper Christian view of general revelation will include the necessary insight that the sacred and the divine can speak to us through art forms like film. Generally, it is far too easy even to attend church without being changed or genuinely spoken to. In church itself, we are subjected to floods of clichés and sentimentality. Many of us can count the times we were intellectually challenged in church on the fingers of one hand. This is not how we ought to live. Neither is it how we ought to approach the experience of church, cinema or anything else. “Like church, an experience in the movie theater can be as shallow or as meaningful as you make it,” argues McCracken. “Movies are sometimes (perhaps most of the time) merely an easy diversionary amusement. We leave the theater unchanged.” (pg. 172) But it doesn’t have to be this way. The problem is that when artists try to do something different with film, they are resisted and unpopular. Their films are often not given wide release. Their films are not noticed by a church preoccupied with either entertainment or evangelization.<br />
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“‘Film as art’ is an idea resisted by many, in part because from its inception film has been a ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ amusement - cheap and accessible to wider swaths of humanity than, say, the opera. In its relatively young history (barely a century old), cinema has been quite commercially lucrative and more associated with ‘fun’ diversions like amusement park rides ... than ‘serious’ activities like reading or visiting an art museum ...<br />
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“[A]udiences tend not to expect to be intellectually challenged by an experience in the movie theater. ‘It’s only a movie. Why should I have to think?’ is a fairly common sentiment. People go into a theater with a different frame of mind from the way they might go into a museum. In the latter case, they’re looking to be educated or challenged; in the former, to be entertained.” (pgs. 173-174)<br />
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But perhaps looking to be entertained is unhealthy. Maybe we shouldn’t be looking to be entertained. It could be that sitting back and being entertained is the opposite of thinking. It is a surrender to sensation, impulse and distraction. It crowds out the ability to view anyone or anything with depth or contemplation.<br />
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“People tend to want a film’s points made quickly and its pleasures immediate, observes [Justin] Chang. ‘The idea that you might sit in a movie and have a meditative or spiritual experience is seen as a little weird ...’” (pg. 176)<br />
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I sometimes fear that this desire for trivial entertainment may even be more common in the church than out of it. What if Christians, of all people, are even more prone to accepting formulas and clichés? What if they, more easily than others, are more willing to just accept whatever they are fed as long as it fits the comfort and strictures of what they have been taught to expect?<br />
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“Like myself, my friend Eugene Suen - a filmmaker of faith and former co-director of the Reel Spirituality Institute at Fuller Seminary - bristles at the unwillingness of Christian audiences to experience films that are challenging or slow ... ‘It’s a shame when anything that even remotely deviates from traditional narrative (‘acceptable’) cinema is seen as alienating, boring, and pretentious,’ notes Suan. He sees this as symptomatic of a fundamental lack of openness, ‘an openness that we need as human beings - indeed, as Christians - in order to enlarge ourselves and arrive at a genuine understanding of others.’” (pg. 177)<br />
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“Cinema,” wrote film director Andrei Tarkovsky, “should be a means of exploring the most complex problems of our time, as vital as those which for centuries have been the subject of literature, music and painting.” Isn’t this how a person, who accepts the claims of Christianity to be true, ought to view film-making? If films really can enlarge our point of view and strengthen our ability to love others, then why are we not seeking out such films?<br />
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This, McCracken hints, could be a powerful way to witness. If we pursue the very best in quality - that which is capable of moving and changing us for the better - then we will begin to cultivate those things that attract others. This is just one example of how we could pursue the things of God in how we live every day.<br />
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“For Christians, approaching film in a thinking way also shows the world that we care: not just to be amused and entertained, but to glean all the value out of a film that we can. It shows that we care to explore all that a filmmaker wants to show us and that we respect the creator of the work enough to do a little interpretive work.” (pg. 177)<br />
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<b>3 - ON THE WORK AND EFFORT THAT CULTURE REQUIRES</b><br />
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There are two other preliminaries here that McCracken establishes well. The next one is the idea that pursuing “culture” is not going to be easy. It requires hard work, effort and energy. It’s one thing to merely agree that “culture” is worth pursuing when one has the energy to do it. It’s another thing altogether to actually do it. “It’s not enough to just affirm the value of ‘engaging culture.’ That’s black-and-white thinking. We must do the work of engaging it <i>well</i>.” (pg. 14) But, the idea that being “cultured” is hard work is a little misleading. It is not “work” in the usual sense that we think of it. Yes, it does require effort. However, it can lead be refreshing, relaxing and invigorating at the same time.<br />
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This isn’t a job that one has to grit one’s teeth over and finish. “The pursuit of a more discerning, well-rounded taste is never finished. It’s a process.” (pg. 128) It’s not just forcing oneself to eat one’s vegetables. It’s not just a chore. McCracken argues that it is a way of living that does not have to end at some utilitarian goal of “getting” the gospel or reaching some sort of security level with God. Real truth, goodness and beauty are not necessarily going to feel safe or comfortable. They can hurt us and shake us and shape us. It takes effort to seek them out.<br />
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“It’s very tempting to ignore difficult truth, or at least to hide from any of the truths that don’t line up in the comfortable, familiar ways we want them to. But art has the ability to shake us out of our comfort zones and show us the realities of existence - both beautiful and ugly - we might otherwise look past or ignore.” (pg. 162)<br />
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But some things, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable, are greatly to be desired and valued. These are, in fact, often just the very things that can give life meaning and make each day worth living through. If we don’t put in the work and the effort, then these are things that will always be lost to us. We will never be able to experience them.<br />
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“The value we derive from something is directly proportional to the effort we put forth to engage it. Whether we’re talking about relationships, jobs, cooking, painting, or parenting, we derive the most pleasure from that which we work the hardest at.” (pg. 178)<br />
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Making the effort equals increased value and worth. The more thought and feeling and work you place into your experience, the more your pleasure in it can surprisingly be deepened. Pursuing the challenging and the stimulating is an active pursuit. You can’t just sit back and hope that it comes to you. You can’t just let life happen to you. That is subjecting yourself to the manipulation of others and it is not giving the things of God that are embedded in culture the attention that they deserve.<br />
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“A passive consumer, who sits back and takes something in without much thought or interpretive effort, is not going to have as full or invested an experience as the consumer who takes a more active interpretative role.” (pg. 178)<br />
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“This goes for other aspects of culture too: if you do the work of learning the nuances of wine varietals, you’ll likely enjoy wine tasting more; if you do the work of researching the historical and aesthetic context of painting, your experience of a gallery will be more satisfying.” (pg. 178)<br />
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I worry that McCracken’s point is another one lost on the average American church. Far too often Christians avoid the culture as somehow being something separate from the gospel. They don’t pursue depth of thought about the world because they assume everything has already been laid out and explained to them. In order to experience the “gospel-centered” life, we somehow are supposed to avoid culture in the world as not part of the gospel-centered life. But McCracken argues that “knowledge rarely detracts from our experience of culture; it enhances it.” (pg. 178)<br />
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Why wouldn’t you enhance and deepen your experience of precisely that part of Christendom in which so many of the things of God can be found?<br />
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There are only two answers: either fear or utter laziness.<br />
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What does this kind of work and effort look like? It means the investment of time. It means refusing to prejudge something you have yet to gain much knowledge of. It means being willing to work your way through first impressions. It means pursuing that which may resist attainment after a firs try. McCracken gives an example:<br />
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“Some of my favorite films only became my favorites after I revisited them for a second or third viewing, giving myself time and distance to consider them more fully. The same principle goes for other cultural experiences, like music. The richness and beauty of an album rarely reveals itself on the first listen; it takes multiple listens to learn to appreciate it. Coffee doesn’t taste beautiful the first time one tries it. Nor does wine. The best things in life require more than just a passing assessment to be truly appreciated.” (pg. 184)<br />
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There is no good reason to just lazily or casually dismiss that which you have not truly tried - especially if others have already testified to the good that can be found within it.<br />
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Ridding our selves of our habitual passing assessments of things we do not understand is one of the preliminaries to deepening our lives.<br />
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<b>4 - ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF TASTE</b><br />
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One of the most aggravating parts of going to church these days, or walking into almost any event organized by American evangelicals, is having to suffer through the incredibly bad taste that they have in just about any one of the arts. It is far too easy to get the impression that Christians today have really <i>really</i> bad taste in music, in films, in architecture, in decor, in art and in culture. It was not always so. <br />
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Far far too often, Christians define their experience of culture by what they avoid. Music is an obvious example. Some of the best music out there has been avoided by Christians - some of the worst music you’ll ever hear is made and produced by Christians. Christian contemporary music (CCM) is arguably some of the most cringe-worthy stuff on the radio. It’s not purchased by consumers looking for quality. Christians have developed a reputation for appreciating things like music for its message, for its use as a tool, for its popular appeal, for its almost anything other than technical craft or artistry. But, “Music appreciation,” McCracken argues “is also about community, artists, critics, tradition, and the development of taste. It’s not just about avoiding the bad and the unhealthy; it’s about energetically educating ourselves to better pursue the good.” (pg. 116)<br />
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This is a thought too easily dismissed. Everyone has their own personal preferences. We are told that we shouldn’t criticize other people for having different tastes than we have. Except, this isn’t true. Some people have better taste in some things than I have, and such critics and connoisseurs should be able to criticize and thereby improve my own uneducated taste. My personal preferences are often the result of lack of experience and education. My personal tastes are often the consequence of my own enclosed and limited life.<br />
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“Preferences are one thing, notes Christian art theorist Hans Rookmaaker, but ‘even if our preferences cannot be discussed, our choices can, since quality and content are not just a matter of taste, but a matter of norms. If we talk about portraits, some are more, some are less beautiful, of a higher or a lower artistic quality.’” (pg. 123) “Developing taste is important because it allows us to enter into a positive critical discourse that has as its goal the discovery and enjoyment of the best that is out there.” (pg. 124)<br />
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McCracken elaborates what I will call the fourth preliminary to thinking about legalism and liberty - the idea of developing improved taste:<br />
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“At this point we must talk about the notion of ‘having good taste.’ Is it even sensible to talk in objective terms about such a thing? Many people would say no. ‘Good quality’ is subjectively defined from culture to culture, class to class, they would say; there’s no such thing as objective good taste.” (pg. 123)<br />
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Is personal taste merely subjective? It does take a bit for McCracken to warm up on this one. “I’m not sure an ironclad, universal formula for ‘good’ art or ‘proper’ taste exists,” he writes. That’s fine, although no one arguing for objective standards in art would ever call what they were advocating for a “universal formula.” But he keeps going - “But I do think that within a given culture - and especially within a given style or genre - objective assessments of quality are valid.” (pg. 123) In other words, within the proper context, objective value judgments about quality can be made.<br />
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In fact, this <i>necessarily</i> follows if you claim to hold to the truths claimed by Christianity. If objective truth really does exist, then it will have some bearing on beauty. It is no coincidence that the “philosophy of aesthetics” (explored since Ancient Greece) presupposes and explores higher standards by which we can lift ourselves and our own limited understands up to something higher.<br />
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“When I asked my friend Laura, a music critic who writes for publications like Under the Radar and Filter, what constitutes ‘objective good’ in music, she said that it existed in different forms within each genre, but that one ‘universal’ marker of good was whether an artist believes in the story they are telling. ‘I need to feel some emotional truth they are exploring, some honesty,’ she said. ‘You can be authentic in any genre, but it’s all about whether an artist is attempting to tell a story that is true.’<br />
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“Laura noted that the ‘easy to swallow’ music that tends to appeal the masses often is created with mass appeal in mind as opposed to authentic truth-telling. Music that is authentic and true is often more difficult and requires more work, she said. ‘The best stuff isn’t always the easiest. We need to ask ourselves, ‘Are we feeding ourselves McDonald’s or are we going to a four-star restaurant?’’” (pg. 124)<br />
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The easy is very often not the best. What is easy to see and understand is often not that of the greatest worth. If you always just go for what is easy, then you are very likely cheating yourself.<br />
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“Christians should recognize that taste has both subjective and objective elements; it includes both our individual resonances with a work and also the larger community of interpretation and evaluation.” If this is true, then we can learn from the larger community and improve the subjective elements of our own taste. We can seek out the critics and connoisseurs who know more than we do and who have more experience than we do. We can pursue the hard and the difficult that we have never tried before. “Good taste is not simply pointing to one’s record collection and declaring it tasteful; good taste is being willing to expand one’s horizons, hear what others have to say, and seek a more thorough understanding of how a work of art can be better perceived, enjoyed, and evaluated.” (pg. 126) It almost follows from this that we possess a duty.<br />
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McCracken’s book then takes the reader through four different topics in order to use them as illustrations - Eating, Drinking, Music and Film.<br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b>ON EATING</b><br />
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“The fact that food is more delicious than it needs to be and that God was generous and went over the top in creating both taste buds and tasty food means, to Tim Chester, that ‘the quality of food should matter to us. We’re to treat food as a gift, not merely as fuel.’” (pg. 38) “... the types of things we eat more of are worse for us: fats, oils, sugars, sweeteners. The average American eats fifteen more pounds of sugar a year today than in 1970, for example. For one of three Americans, this often spells high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, or cancer.” (pg. 55) “If we give no thought to the health of the food we eat and frequently indulge in gluttonous displays of junk food eating, what does that say about our appreciation of God’s gifts (including the gift our own body)?” (pg. 250)<br />
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I can admit that when I, with my limited perspective as a bachelor, think of culture, I most often do not think of food. I put very little thought into what I eat. McCracken makes the argument that we ought to make the effort to pay attention to what and how we eat. I was struck by his quoting Robert Farrar Capon: “The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God’s design, our lawful love.” (pg. 39) I have never really been taught this before, or if I have, I was never paying attention. Food is not fuel and neither is it a mere convenience.<br />
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The most utilitarian part of my life may actually be my diet. But this is unhealthy. For the Christian, it is really bad theology not to care what you eat. What a difference it could make if we were to eat for pleasure rather than utility and for health rather than only for energy. But, at the same time, McCracken warns against snobbery. Yes, we may enjoy using “Whole Foods” or “Trader Joe’s” or “Farmer’s Markets,” but the opportunities for healthy or organic produce are still often limited to a higher price level. There are those in our society how cannot financially afford to eat healthy. If this is true, then there is still something fundamentally wrong with the way we live.<br />
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“It can be easy for those with expendable time and money to talk about the healthier, environmentally friendlier superiority of ‘slow food’ and more natural, unprocessed food, but when you’re a single mom struggling to pay rent and feed young children, fast food can be a lifesaver. Some fast-food chains are getting better about offering healthy options, but the fact is, most healthy food is not all that affordable or convenient for the majority of eaters around the world ... What can we do to make healthier good more accessible to all people? Until we address these issues, none of us should look down our noses at those who eat at McDonald’s or shop at discount grocery stores. For many people, it’s the best they can do.” (pg. 63)<br />
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But there’s more.<br />
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Eating is not just a pleasure. It’s not just a good and healthy necessity that can be improved by intentional work. It can be spiritually healthy too. How we eat can affect how we relate to others. “For Jesus, the table was a prime opportunity to live out his generous gospel of grace - a symbolic activity that underscores the social significance of dining in community.” (pg. 40) Some of the best meals I have ever had were in the company of family and friends - or, when I was all alone in a strange place, being included at the table of a generous family I didn’t know.<br />
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We now too often neglect the communal part of eating. Hosting guests at your table was traditionally considered, in ages past, of more than mere material significance. Fellowship and conversation were meant to go together with dining. There is something perhaps even mystical about having a group of friends or family around your table and sharing in the pleasure of eating lovingly prepared and carefully crafted meals. It creates a bond. It is a form of love.<br />
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It is therefore, McCracken argues, no coincidence that one of the Christian sacraments is the act of participating in the Lord’s Supper, Communion or the Eucharist:<br />
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“Why is the Eucharist such a big deal? Well, for one thing it is the central symbolic action of the Christian life. In this meal, as we take the bread and the cup, we remember and give thanks for the suffering and sacrifice of Jesus for us, we join in communion with our fellow believers, and we look forward to the second coming of Christ and the messianic feast to come ... Peter Leithart says the Lord’s Supper is ‘the world in miniature; it has cosmic significance.’” (pg. 41)<br />
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“... the Eucharist - rebuffs the isolationist mode of consumption. It’s a sacred means of connection and solidarity. In it we identify with the suffering of Christ. We connect with our Savior and his body: our fellow believers throughout the ages.” (pg. 54)<br />
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And it isn’t just that a Christian can participate in the meaning of the Eucharist during a church service. It’s a form of participation <i>in meaning</i> during a hearty meal in fellowship with others. Therefore, part of being “cultured” ought to mean a significant amount of <i>sharing</i>. Something as simple as hosting others for dinner around your table is imbued with a tradition of communing - of community and love and friendship - that deepens the experience of eating. What we eat can obviously be good and pleasurable - and it will be if one makes the effort to pay attention. How we eat with others can strengthen who we are as social beings and members of a fellowship.<br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b>ON DRINKING</b><br />
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McCracken also spends a chapter exploring the issue of drinking alcohol. As a demonstration of the current state of the American church, this discussion is a good illustration of one of our major problems. He starts the chapter out by explaining: “The fourth and final area of culture to be explored in this book is easily the most controversial: alcohol.” (pg. 189) Is it though? Drinking alcohol is still one of the most controversial issues in the American Church? Why? If it is, doesn’t that demonstrate a profound disconnect with the entirety of church history? “It’s a dicey, dangerous topic, one that has long divided Christians and is fiercely debated even today.” (pg. 189) But that's just it, drinking alcohol is not that big of a deal in church history. It is not an issue that has long divided Christians. <i>It’s an issue that apparently still divides Christians now</i>, but I would argue that this is still, in the context of church history, a recent phenomenon.<br />
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The fact that McCracken even has to discuss this is a clue to the problem. This problem in the American Church is twofold: (a) an almost total ignorance of the elementary rules for interpreting Scripture and (b) a vast ignorance of church history.<br />
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No, wine in Scripture is not grape juice. (pgs. 194-195) Instead, the Bible merely teaches that it is drunkenness, not drinking itself, that is a sin. (pgs. 195-196) But this teaching is one-sided unless we also take into account that alcohol is considered to be a joy and a blessing by Scripture, even in both a material and eschatological sense. (pgs. 196-198) Abstinence is not commanded by the Bible. While it does have its uses, it is not common. (pg. 198-199) Moderation is the answer - <i>abusus non tollit usum</i> - and this “goes without saying ...” (pg. 232)<br />
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The chapter on drinking makes for good reading because McCracken also takes us through some church history on the subject. In doing this, he is soon forced to admit: “Have Christians always been so divided about it? (Short answer: no.) Is it significant that followers of Christ were the first people to invent sophisticated wine-and-beer-making techniques (in medieval monasteries) but also the people who led the charge to make alcohol illegal in America?” (pgs. 205-206)<br />
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Thus the history of church theology and alcohol arguably begins in the second century with St. Clement of Alexandria -<br />
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“In his <i>Pedagogia</i> - perhaps the earliest Christian ethic of alcohol consumption - St. Clement of Alexandria discusses the Christian’s obligation to drink wine as part of the Eucharist while also being careful to avoid drunkenness. Clement urged ... ‘In what manner do you think the Lord drank when He became man for our sakes? ... For rest assured, He Himself also partook wine; for He, too, was man. And He blessed the wine, saying, Take drink: this is my blood - the blood of the vine ... And he who drinks ought to observe moderation ...’ (pg. 206)<br />
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And don’t forget the Irish missionaries like St. Patrick -<br />
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“In the medieval period, as Christians spread the gospel throughout pagan lands, beer played a positive role. As St. Patrick introduced the gospel to the wild pagan land of Ireland, he ‘captured many an Irish tribal chieftain with his tasty beer before he won the man for God.’ In the Holy Roman Empire, beer lover Charlemagne promoted improvements in brewing at monasteries throughout the empire ...” (pg. 207)<br />
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It was churches who first began improving techniques for cultivating the production of high quality wines. (pg. 207) It was Christians in monasteries who built the foundations for modern beer brewing, once again focusing on quality. In fact, there are still some “brews today - such as Weihenstephan (founded in AD 1040) and Leffe (AD 1240) - [that] originated in medieval monasteries.” (pg. 210) “Nuns also joined in the beer-making business. Hildegard von Bingen was a brewer and is sometimes credited with the discovery that hops added preservative qualities to ale.” (pg. 210) Martin Luther was an enthusiastic beer drinker. He taught some of his classes in taverns with beer and his wife also brewed her own beer. (pg. 211)<br />
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It is almost comical when we realize that, if the American church had only listened to Martin Luther, we could have avoided all the misguided nonsensical teaching we’ve been given on the subject. “You should be moderate and sober,” Luther instructed, “this means that we should not be drunken, though we may be exhilarated ... The mind will tolerate a certain degree of elevation, but this most be moderate, not indecent.” Luther even responded to potential prohibitionists of his day. “Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?” (pg. 211)<br />
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Add to this the beginnings of American history. When the Pilgrims first landed on Plymouth Rock, the very first building they built was a brewery. (pg. 212) The ship that brought John Winthrop and the Puritans to the New World carried “more than 10,000 gallons of wine and three times as much beer as water.” (pg. 208) And “Post-Reformation Christians such as George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards, for example, were known to enjoy rum and hard cider, respectively.” (pg. 211) Let’s also not forget Arthur Guinness over in Ireland.<br />
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McCracken contrasts this history with what we have now:<br />
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“... folks like Stephen Reynolds (author of <i>The Biblical Approach to Alcohol</i>), who argues that the Bible teaches ‘an absolute prohibition against the beverage use of alcohol,’ and John MacArthur, who in a 2011 blog post on alcohol and Christianity said, ‘It is puerile and irresponsible for any pastor to encourage the recreational use of intoxicants.’” (pg. 193)<br />
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John MacArthur’s article <a href="http://www.gty.org/Blog/B110809">“Beer, Bohemianism, and True Christian Liberty”</a> is both strident and one-sided. He argues that the “image of beer-drinking Bohemianism does nothing to advance the cause of Christ’s kingdom.” (pg. 214) After reading it, I still find it unclear exactly how MacArthur distinguishes “beer-drinking Bohemianism” from “beer-drinking.” Many other believers like G.K. Chesterton would heartily disagree. (But, of course, Chesterton would have disagreed with a large amount of what the Calvinist MacArthur currently has to say.)<br />
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McCracken’s summary of the rest of the story is sharp and informative. It’s worth the read. He takes us through the fundamentalist and evangelical rhetoric that led to the American Prohibition. He explains how Welch’s pasteurized <b>non-fermented grape juice replaced wine at church communion around 1869.</b> (Stop and think about where that date stands in the middle of all of church history for a moment.) And McCracken also admits that the critiques of drinking do rely on some hard, real-world facts about the consequences of abusing alcohol.<br />
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The destruction on human lives that abuse of alcohol wrecks is real. It’s a problem in our modern culture that we cannot ignore. Thus, while drinking with friends and family is a form of communion and fellowship, McCracken cautions us that we ought to be careful about dismissing those who try to bring attention to the existence of abuse.<br />
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Alcoholism is not to be scoffed at. There are some critics of the church (and I’m one of them) who are very dismissive of the modern American church’s teaching on subjects like alcohol. “American evangelicalism is unique in its fear and avoidance of alcohol, they say. And there is some truth in this.” (pg. 225) But this doesn’t let us off from responsibility or from giving the other side a fair hearing either.<br />
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“But let’s be real here. Whether they like it or not, American Christians live within a culture in which alcohol is viewed in a particular way and where certain habits of consumption prevail. Ours is a culture of college binge drinking, keggers, underage drinking as rebellion, and Bud Light commercials.” (pg. 225)<br />
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So the question turns to what has caused these sort of modern cultural habits of excess and disregard. Perhaps it has something to do with mass market consumption, an evil that craft brewing may help provide an antidote for. (pg. 234) Perhaps, like almost everything else in our culture, it has something to do with the loss of thinking <i>of</i> wine or beer as the art form that the monks and nuns of history used to think of it. “We are artisans, not industry,” McCracken quotes a Spanish winemaker as explaining. Perhaps it is because, like so many other things, we view alcohol for what it can do for us rather than enjoying it for the thing that it is.<br />
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McCracken’s conclusion is refreshing: Don’t use alcohol. Enjoy it.<br />
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“When we use it,” he writes, “we diminish it to nothing more than a tool in service of disordered desires. We lose sight of the fact that alcohol can be as complex and aesthetically rich as a painting or ballet.” (pg. 234) “As a corollary to the ‘receive, don’t use’ approach to alcohol is this advice: love it for how it tastes more than for how it makes you feel. This isn’t to say that the ‘buzz’ of alcohol is always a bad thing - it is surely one of its manifold blessings, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But when the buzz is the main reason we drink alcohol, it becomes far easier to abuse it. Plus, it turns the activity of drinking into a me-centered activity of ‘what this drink does to me’ rather than ‘how this drink communicates beauty.’ This is why people who drink primarily for the buzz - college kids, partiers, ‘bros,’ soccer hooligans, and so on - don’t mind drinking swill like Coors, Bud Light, Heineken, and Shock Top. It’s not about the taste for them. If it’s a cold beverage and gives them a buzz, it’s enough.” (pgs. 235-236)<br />
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“In my life, some of the most profound moments of connection and deepest occasions of feeling known have occurred over fermented beverages: discussing the mysteries of God’s grace over pints under the stars in Oxford; gathering at a pub with friends to laugh and share stories together long into the night; toasting to my best friend on the night before his wedding; sipping wine at an oceanside restaurant with the girl I love. These moments can be transcendent.” (pg. 227)<br />
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I cannot begin to describe the joy and fellowship that can result from the view towards alcohol that McCracken ultimately advocates for. It is the traditional Christian view, the loss of which has, perhaps not coincidentally, precisely coincided with what I can only describe as mass-produced watery horribly-tasting gag-inducing-smelling alcoholic versions of heavily carbonated soda-water - abominations produced with no sense of art that are drunk for no other reason than to experience their alcoholic effects. There is nothing manly about drinking for unrestrained appetite and oblivion rather than for pleasure and merriment. <br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>ON MUSIC</b><br />
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All of these same principles apply to other art forms, including music and film. In his chapter on music, McCracken competently discusses the problems facing the Christian. While he doesn’t criticize it as heavily as I would, the most uncomfortable trend in the church’s relation to the art form of music becomes Contemporary Christian Music.<br />
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At some point in church history in the United States, Christians became less serious about quality in art. It necessarily followed that when jazz and eventually rock music came onto the scene, the church decided to try to copy it. Unfortunately, in the copying, quality was not the point. The problem was all those impure lyrics. Thus the unfortunate business of having prominent voices like Rick Warren saying things like “There is no such thing as Christian music; only Christian lyrics.” McCracken respectfully disagrees.<br />
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Anyone who has grown up in the church recently has experienced the phenomenon of “Christian Rock” and CCM. “Christian rock flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. An entire industry - Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) - was born, offering Christianized (i.e., lyrically pure) alternatives that sounded like secular rock but didn’t lead listeners straight to hell.” (pg. 81)<br />
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The more you think about it, the more embarrassing it becomes. For example, McCracken provides us with Dan and Steve Peters as Exhibit A. These guys wrote books promoting the latest and trendiest Christian copycat music, and tried to sell inferior bands and their record labels by marketing them as alternatives to secular bands and labels:<br />
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“In [<i>What About</i>] <i>Christian Rock</i>? the Peters brothers suggest, for example, ‘alternatives’ like Ken Medema (a sort of Christian Stevie Wonder), Jerusalem (‘CCM’s answer to Scorpion’), In 3D (‘reminiscent of The Police’), Silverwind (‘Abba sound-alike’), and John Michael Talbot (‘Gordon Lightfoot-like’).” (pg. 82)<br />
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Thankfully, there has also now been some solid criticism of CCM from within the church. One example is the book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/At-Crossroads-Present-Contemporary-Christian/dp/0877881286/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382671576&sr=1-1&keywords=At+the+Crossroads+Peacock"><i>At the Crossroads: An Insider’s Look at the Past, Present, and Future of Contemporary Christian Music</i></a> (1999) by Charlie Peacock. “Peacock’s critique presciently observes the identity crisis of CCM, noting that while most forms of popular music are named according to their musical style (jazz, blues, classical, folk, rap, rock), CCM has to tie its identity to the lyrics or to a profession of faith by the artists. But Peacock warns that ‘getting listeners to recognize Christian music does not ensure that they will engage the music and lyric with the depth of interest they need to derive some spiritual, emotional, or intellectual benefit from them.’” (pg. 85)<br />
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The problem is again that Christians today tend to think of music as something they can <i>use</i> to promote their own message. Music ceases to be an art form and becomes merely a tool. The music ceases to matter and quality is replaced in importance by the religious content of lyrics. Guitars and drum sets have created magic in the right talented hands. In the church, guitars and drum sets are used more as a tool to attract the young - to demonstrate how “cool” or with the times the church really is. The result is bad, poorly performed, amateur hour. McCracken notes that Peacock and others have been arguing for a different approach.<br />
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Theologically, if real beauty can point to God, then the best and greatest pieces of music will glorify God in ways that the less beautiful cannot. If the church were to focus again on the power that music can have, then it would focus on promoting musicians with talent rather than musicians who can’t cut it in the marketplace who cut it in the Christian world by simply adding the desired gospel lyrics. “In this approach, music is seen as an art form rather than an evangelistic tool.” (pg. 87) Historically, the church has supported some of the greatest composers and musicians the world has ever seen. Currently, the church is supporting many talentless performers for what is essentially religious utilitarian purposes.<br />
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Without viewing music as the art form that it is, the church is in danger of using music that does not affect anyone spiritually. And this is despite that fact that even Plato and Aristotle understood that good music can shape the soul and inspire virtue. The current state of the CCM offerings that one can find at one’s local Christian knick-knack store are not of the positive soul-shaping variety.<br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b>ON FILM</b><br />
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Again, like other parts of culture, it is astonishing how little to no thought we place into the films that we watch. One of the problems with our mass-media society is the lack of attention we are willing to give to just about anything. “We may discuss a movie in the five minutes between leaving the theater and getting in the car, but often it stops there; we’ve moved on. Sometimes we don’t even have that. The credits roll and we press Stop, open our laptops, and move on to another media encounter.” (pg. 183)<br />
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In no part of culture does browsing, flitting, transient attention reward us. Value arises from cultivated interest, from focus and thought. Our theater, DVD and film streaming movie watching will be worthless if we are not willing to put in the time and effort into treating it as any art form ought to be treated.<br />
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But this does not mean that, just as Christians have ruined their tastes in music by a sort of utilitarian gospel thinking, they ought to do the same with film. Unfortunately this is just what has happened. “Some Christians are only interested in films insofar as they explicitly preach the gospel or relay an unmistakably biblical message. This approach typically downplays aesthetics in favor of unmissable morals, preferring didactic directness over subtlety. Good films are evangelistic films. Examples: <i>A Thief in the Night</i>, <i>Fireproof</i>.” (pg. 133) “Or faith is reduced to schmaltzy simplicity, as in most ‘Christian films’ (<i>Facing the Giants</i>, <i>The Grace Card</i>).” (pg. 169)<br />
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But this is just the thing. “Christian” films are always B-movies or worse. They don’t attract any actors who are serious about their own profession. They don’t attract script writers or directors who are interested in film as an art. You have to pause for a moment to consider how films and music being produced out of this artless void are going to influence a person’s soul. Suddenly, you have people for whom art ceases to be art. For all intents and purposes, whole parts of culture have been wiped out for them - completely eliminated from their lives.<br />
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They are essentially listening to music or watching a film with a pre-packaged expectation that they ought to hear the gospel message. If we’ve learned anything from the actual films and music that has been made and sold to the church, quality of the work does not matter. If it contains the gospel message, then that satisfies them. If it doesn’t, they will be disappointed and may even question whether it’s “Christian” at all. Aesthetic experience is lost for them.<br />
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For a good recent example of the type of film this mindset produces, <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/october-web-only/grace-unplugged.html?paging=off">see Kenneth R. Morefield's thoughtful critique of the film, <i>Grace Unplugged</i>.</a><br />
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“But,” McCracken writes, “it’s too easy to just harp on how terrible Christian films are. The bigger question is whether or not the genre is even necessary. What makes one film ‘Christian’ and another not? If it contains a clear presentation of the gospel, is it automatically a ‘Christian’ film? If the filmmakers are Christian, do we call their films ‘Christian films’? Or is the term perhaps only fitting for movies that are made by Christian churches?” (pg. 186)<br />
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These questions are ultimately unimportant. When one finally asks them, it helps to realize just how much they just don’t matter. McCracken offers an alternative:<br />
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“As Christians seeking to be more thoughtful consumers of film, what should we make of ‘Christian’ movies? My short answer is that we should approach this genre of film in the same way we should approach any other, evaluating it with the same criteria we would evaluate anything.” (pg. 185)<br />
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In other words, he advocates for the traditionally approach. Instead of mixing our Christianity with marketing gimmicks and utilitarian motivations for using art, we could, after all, treat art as ... art.<br />
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This doesn’t mean we have to discourage Christian work in film or music, but it does mean demanding some of the basics fundamental to a work of art. Merely demanding these basic expectations for quality work would eliminate the vast majority of, well, just about everything sold in a local Christian bookstore.<br />
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“We should certainly support Christian filmmakers. But we shouldn’t coddle them, and we shouldn’t encourage low-quality work.” We shouldn’t encourage low-quality work by purchasing anything that they make. There are, in fact, a number of Christian production companies that ought to go bankrupt for lack of popular demand for their products.<br />
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McCracken argues:<br />
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“And as Christian consumers who care about honoring God through the arts, we should simply support <i>the best</i> - the most truthful, beautiful, God-glorifying - whether it is made by the hands of a Christian or a pagan.” (pg. 187)<br />
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This is so obvious that it is rather embarrassing that McCracken even has to say it.<br />
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So how ought those of us in the church to approach film. One option that McCracken discusses is what he calls the “aesthetically transcendent” approach:<br />
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“In this approach, ‘sacred’ films are those that - through exceptional artistry and powerful narrative - evoke feelings of transcendental longing akin to what Germans call <i>Sehnsucht</i>. They are films so beautiful that the viewer is brought to a place of stasis or spiritual contemplation. Christians who favor this approach are less interested in specifically Christian messages or plotlines than they are in true, powerful portrayals of beauty and longing. Examples: <i>Tokyo Story</i>; <i>The Tree of Life</i>.” (pg. 134)<br />
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This is not just some elitist art critic’s way of doing things. Since Ancient Greece through the Medieval Ages and Renaissance, thinkers and theologians have long discussed how art can point us to the things of God. True beauty is of divine origin. Art works that capture this will point all of us, no matter what our educations, tastes or vocations happen to be, towards that origin.<br />
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Another challenge to this approach is that which has been taken by many “Christian” film critics. To them, the acceptability of a film can be measured by its lack of what would be viewed as negative or uncivil conduct in a “Christian” subcultural setting.<br />
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“In 1968, the Production Code was officially replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America’s voluntary movie classification system, which assigned a rating (in their current form: G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17) to films based on content ... For Christians concerned about film content, this shift complicated things a bit. Was an R rating an immediate and in-all-cases marker of inappropriateness? ... This gave rise to publications like Focus on the Family’s Plugged In magazine, now a website that offers reviews of films (as well as music and television) for evangelical parents ... Plugged In includes eyebrow-raising discussions of a film’s ‘positive elements,’ ‘spiritual content,’ ‘nudity and sexual content,’ ‘violent content,’ ‘crude or profane language,’ ‘drug and alcohol content,’ and ‘other negative elements.’ Reviews are exhaustive in their detail, with vivid overviews of sexual content (‘A teen girl strips down to her panties in Jim’s room and touches herself.’) as well as exact counts of f-words and cautions that, ‘Unfortunately, the Lord’s name is abused 15 times (‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ are used six times; ‘g–d–n’ six times).’” (pg. 145)<br />
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It’s not that obscenity is not a real issue in the arts. The ways in which obscenity can affect the value of a work of art is yet another subject that has been deeply explored since pre-Biblical Ancient Greece. In philosophy, “aesthetics” has an entire line of thought that addresses obscenity. But this is not where these content measurers are coming from. I have read far too many of their reviews to fail to see how art is simply not their concern. And how could it be? If I was a reviewer tasked with counting each cuss word, detailing and describing every instance of revealed skin or sexual content, and if I had to sit down and make that list while watching the film, there is no way I could appreciate it. The entire approach precludes experiencing the film as a work of art in the first place.<br />
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“This curse-counting approach was ‘perfected’ in Ted Baehr’s <i>Movieguide</i>, ‘The family guide to movies and entertainment.’” (pg. 145) Indeed, Mr. Baehr has gained something of a reputation over the years. When you start reading about why he recommends some films and why he condemns others, the most obvious thing about Mr. Baehr is that he has allowed his ideological viewpoint to restrict his experience of film. He then advocates that everyone else ought to hold to his own limitations.<br />
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Most recently, the <i>Movieguide</i> has strongly recommended <i>Grace Unplugged</i>, <i>Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2</i>, <i>I’m in Love with a Church Girl</i>, <i>Gravity</i>, <i>King’s Faith</i>, <i>Prisoners</i> and <i>Beyond the Heavens</i>. Haven’t heard of some of those? There’s a good reason why. It has also, meanwhile, strongly condemned <i>The Counselor</i> and <i>The Deep Blue Sea</i>. This is the mindset that ends up writing this like this in its review of <i>To the Wonder</i>: “Malick breaks from traditional storytelling technique more than ever with this tale, leaving the movie too ambiguous and giving the audience little to take away from the story.” Or of <i>Lincoln</i>: “Also, there’s much strong foul language, to the point of being excessive. Finally, the movie suggests that the ends justifies the means.” This is a mindset that can summarize the film, <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> like this: “It includes church scenes, but has an overall ironic feel to it. Each broken character is depressed or dealing with something negative and trying to piece together their life. In the end, however, many of the characters make the right decision.”<br />
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Or, if you want final conclusive evidence that there is a problem here, <i>Movieguide</i> strongly recommends the new <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> as “is a beautiful rendition of the classic play by Shakespeare, with wonderful performances and some important lessons.” This is because they “get married within a church and take counsel from a priest.” Somehow, <i>Movieguide</i> completely missed the entire much talked about controversy about this film and why it has garnered so many negative reviews. Why? Because the film is NOT a “rendition of the classic play by Shakespeare.” Shakespeare’s language has been gutted, replaced and dumbed down. It’s not Shakespeare. Sadly, I’m afraid that we may be able to reasonably conclude that Movieguide wasn’t able to tell. Case closed.<br />
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McCracken’s suggested alternatives offer a different way of thinking.<br />
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“Not every Christian film critic ascribes to Ted Baehr’s methods of evaluating movies, however, and increasingly, Christian approaches to engaging film are going beyond ‘curse counting’ and ‘family friendliness’ rubrics as methods of evaluating film. ‘Parents’ guides’ are still going strong, of course, but more and more Christians seem to be opening up to a relationship with cinema that is less about culture war defensiveness and more about thoughtful engagement.” (pg. 147)<br />
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“The <a href="http://artsandfaith.com/t100/"><i>2011 Arts and Faith Top 100 Films</i></a> list is a good barometer of an increasing sophistication in the way Christians value and engage cinema. The list, voted on by sixty-five professional film writers and lecturers, lifelong cinephiles, seminary students, and ordinary movie fans, celebrates films with overt religious themes (<i>Jesus of Montreal</i>, <i>The Apostle</i>, <i>A Man for All Seasons</i>) but also films with "sublime expression of humane values" (<i>Tokyo Story</i>, <i>Bicycle Thieves</i>), "populist favorites" (<i>It's a Wonderful Life</i>), and "dreamy art-house tone poems" (<i>Wings of Desire</i>). It's telling that the list is made up of nearly two-thirds foreign language films with only a handful of films from the last ten years. Christians are increasingly exploring the history and aesthetic accomplishments of cinema, finding in secular and world cinema great truth and beauty with incredible relevance to the life of faith.” (pg. 148)<br />
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I have to admit some bias here. I’ve been a participant over at Arts and Faith since 2009. But the point is that I am often challenged and am always learning whenever I converse with others who view film as the art form that it is. There is a vast wealth and treasury of great films that exist that are increasingly being seen by less and less people. Why would we ever choose to neglect or to be ignorant of these films?<br />
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I believe this question has special import for the Christian believer. McCracken tries to explain it:<br />
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“I’d say filmgoing is, from time to time, a worshipful experience for me. It doesn’t take the place of church, of course, but in a very real sense it can be an experience quite similar to church: a quiet, large room, filled with a wide swath of humanity immersed in an often very emotional, engrossing, powerful narrative. It’s no wonder movie theaters have been called ‘the church of the masses.’ ... [M]ovies can ... be quite profound, even life changing. They can enhance communities and spark lively conversations; they can show us things we’ve never seen and confront us with truth in jarring ways. And perhaps most vitally for the Christian consumer, a movie can most certainly bear witness to the majesty of God and the beautiful complexity of his creation.” (pg. 172)<br />
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Personally, I have been regularly amazed, refreshed and altered by the films of masters like Paul Thomas Anderson, Lynne Ramsay, James Gray, Susanne Bier, the Coen brothers, Whit Stillman, the Dardenne brothers, Wim Wenders, Peter Weir, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Abbas Kiarostami, Terry Gilliam, Francis Ford Coppola, Andrei Tarkovsky, Eric Rohmer, Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, David Lean, Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, Frank Capra, Jean Renoir, Carl Theodor Dreyer and many others. I've hardly begun to see all the films of some of these directors. Almost everyone I know have seen very little of any of these director's films. Almost everyone I know in the church has seen almost none of these directors' films. And yet, these are the very directors who often are trying to achieve the transcendent in their work.<br />
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This doesn’t mean that we ought to be always willing to try anything and everything. There can still be moral limits to the experience of art. I fail to see any serious arguments in the realm of aesthetics for excluding the moral sphere from art. McCracken rightly warns us not to go too far in the other direction.<br />
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“Even as a verified cinephile and apologist for the form, I would be deceiving myself if I ignored or downplayed the very serious perils that can accompany a reckless, indiscriminate or excessive consumption of movies. Christians may have gone overboard in the past in their confrontational, separatist, hands-off approach to Hollywood, but it would be equally problematic to err on the other side - embracing cinema uncritically, without careful discernment.” (pg. 187)<br />
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When it comes down to it, the problem is the lack of thought. Too many in the church have long been uncritical in rejecting works of art in film. It would be too easy to be just as uncritical in accepting all works of art in film. We need to cultivate what is truly of worth. We need to search for that which is edifying and spiritually healthy. And film can be incredibly invigorating if it is treated in this way.<br />
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“The reality is that cinema, like so many areas of culture, has the potential to be beautiful, life-giving, even transcendent, but it also has the potential to be degrading, exploitative, addictive, and desensitizing.” (pg. 187)<br />
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<b>ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE CHURCH WITH ART</b><br />
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In my opinion, the most powerful point of McCracken’s book is that he is ultimately arguing for what the church used to possess. If you look at church history, the church has a habit of actively engaging, supporting and patronizing the arts.<br />
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“There’s a great tradition of cultural patronage within Christianity; the church has been ground zero for some of the most magnificent art commissions in history (e.g., Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel). I say let’s revive our heritage of being leaders in patronage. Let’s support artists, paying for them to flourish and create more good work. Let’s fund legitimate artistic creation within our sacred spaces. More than <i>just saying</i> we are pro-art, we should let our money talk: fund forward-thinking architecture; commission stained glass artists, sculptors, and painters for works inside our churches; pay the aspiring chef in our congregation to cater a meal for the community.” (pg. 122)<br />
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Whether considering food, drink, music or film, there is a way of treating the creation of art that naturally follows from Christian theology. To withdraw from the arts & humanities is theologically unsound. To withdraw from culture, or to create merely a separate subculture, is also theological error. If anything, the doctrine of General Revelation demands that the Christian believer not be closed to the good inherent within culture. McCracken’s book is valuable because he is voicing this insight - one that has been lost in the American church over time.<br />
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The “uncultured Christian” is a Christian who doesn’t take his or her own theology seriously.<br />
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<b><a href="http://cincinnatusploughsare.blogspot.com/2013/12/gray-matters-2013-by-brett-mccracken.html">Here is the Link to Part Two.</a></b>J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-83349777096384563322013-09-06T20:32:00.000-07:002014-02-02T10:56:58.350-08:00UP FROM LIBERALISM (1959) - by William F. Buckley, Jr. (book review)<b>- Originally published at <a href="http://redemptiosehnsucht.blogspot.com/2011/05/up-from-liberalism-1959-by-william-f.html"><i>Redemptio Sehnsucht</i></a> on May 2, 2011 - </b>___________________________________________________________________________________________________<br />
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Times are changing. William F. Buckley left us on February 27, 2008. On March 4, 2008, John McCain won the Republican ticket for the Presidential election. On September 3, he was nominated at the Republican National Convention. His loss to Obama on November 4th was easily foreseeable to anyone who understood the destruction McCain wrecked upon his own campaign the moment he decided to support the TARP bailout of October, 2008. McCain's support of the bailout represented a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, an understanding diametrically opposed to that of conservatism. How many conservative votes McCain lost as a result of this failure is impossible to estimate, but representative of this blunder was Buckley's own son, Christopher, announcing that he was voting for Obama bascially as a protest vote against McCain's version of his father's conservatism. <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama">Christopher Buckley wrote</a> -<br />
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<i>“John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, ‘We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.' This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget ‘by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"</i><br />
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Ah yes, the Sarah Palin nomination ... on August 29, 2008, McCain
announced that Palin was his choice for his Vice-Presidential running
mate. The only reason he chose her was to try and rally support from
conservatives that he was already losing. Unfortunately, even though
Palin is a nice lady, and even though she <i>was</i> more conservative
than McCain, her ability to actually articulate the conservative
position was, to put it nicely, somewhat inadequate. While she could
handle questions lobbed at her by Sean Hannity, having her principles
challenged by Katie Couric on CBS News turned ugly. The entire
interview glumly foreshadowed many future Palin speeches. When asked
about the bailout, she replied -<br />
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<i>“That's why I say, I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're
ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the tax
payers looking to bail out, but ultimately, what the bailout does is
help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed
to help shore up our economy, helping tho— it's got to be all about job
creation too, shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right
track, so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending
has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And
trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as— competitive— scary
thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today,
we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under
the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.”</i><br />
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Inability to articulate yourself. This is a historical problem that
some conservatives have struggled with in the past, as explained in the
book I was just privileged to finish reading entitled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/From-Liberalism-William-Buckley-Jr/dp/1258119838"><i>Up From Liberalism</i> by William F. Buckley, Jr.</a><br />
<br />
Buckley was a literary master, and his
intellectual defense of basic American principles will be treasured for
generations to come. But, what is striking about <i>Up From Liberalism</i>
is his critique of the failure of conservatives to articulate
themselves back in the 1950s. Anyone following the tradition of Edmund
Burke would do well to heed Buckley's warnings against rhetorical
incompetence. It is highly refreshing to read the prose of any writer
who can order the English language towards lucid thought. It is not a
coincidence that the celebrated novelist, John Dos Passos, was delighted
to write the Foreword for the book. Passos writes -<br />
<br />
<i>“THE FIRST DUTY OF a man trying to plot a course for clear thinking is to produce words that really apply to the situations he is trying to describe. I don't mean a fresh set of neologisms devised, like thieves' cant or doubletalk, to hold the uninitiated at arm's length. We have seen enough of that in the jargon of the academic sociologists which seems to have been invented to prove that nobody but a Ph.D. can understand human behavior. Plain English will do quite well enough, but the good old words have to be brought back to life by being used in their original sense for a change."</i><br />
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In his 1959 Preface, Buckley writes -<br />
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<i>“As to the conservative movement, our troubles are legion. Those who charge that there is no conservative position have an easy time of it rhetorically. There is no commonly-acknowledged conservative position today, and any claim to the contrary is easy to make sport of. Yet there is to be found in contemporary conservative literature both a total critique of liberalism, and compelling proposals for the reorientation of our thought. Conservatism must, however, be wiped clean of the parasitic cant that defaces it, and repels so many of those who approach it inquiringly."</i><br />
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It is this point of Buckley's I want to focus on in this column. For the first one hundred and forty pages of the book, Buckley takes a satirical look at liberalism, and lambasts the ideas of the New Deal, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Crosby, Keynesian economics, the then current administrations of Yale and Harvard, the Paul H. Hughes fiasco, the political compromises of Dwight Eisenhower, anti-McCarthyism, and the taxation policies of the state of New York. If you don't know who all these people or events are, it would be worth your while to educate yourself on them by reading Buckley's book.<br />
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Here's a few enjoyable examples: For instance on page 30, Buckley makes fun of the liberal's absolute fanatical commitment to the cause of labor unions, a commitment that demands personal attacks upon anyone at all who disagrees with them -<br />
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<i>“In the fall of 1958, Miss Irene Dunne, then a member of the United States delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations, made a statement to the effect that in her opinion the right to work is a human right. The National Council for Industrial Peace did not lose a minute. It released a statement by Mrs. Roosevelt impugning the motives of all right-to-work proponents. As for Miss Dunne, said Mrs. Roosevelt, she had </i><i><i>‘</i>perhaps unwittingly' (That is, quite possibly Miss Dunne intended to deceive) allied herself with ‘those who seek to enslave the American worker. The truth [as distinguished from that which one hears from such as Irene Dunne] is that the so-called right-to-work proposal does not concern itself ... with human rights or the right to work ... It's sole purpose is to enact into law a compulsory open shop that would destroy ... a democratic right.' In a word, anyone backing right-to-work is deceitful, totalitarian and anti-democratic, or in any case prepared to further the efforts of those who are."</i><br />
<br />
Or, on page 88, Buckley cherishes the few people who still don't mince their words -<br />
<br />
<i>“There is something to be said for breaking away from modulation's trance; for straight thought, and straight talk, even of the kind which, on account of its directness, is capable of lifting people right out of their chairs; the kind of talk that will risk for the talker the reputation of being impolitic and ungenteel. At a crowded reception at the Kremlin in the early 1930s, Lady Astor turned to Stalin and asked, ‘When are you going to stop killing people?' Bishop Sheen once called up Heywood Broun, whom he had never met but whose nihilistic columns he read every day, and told him he wanted to see him. ‘What about?' asked Broun gruffly. ‘About your soul,' said Bishop Sheen."</i><br />
<br />
But while Buckley admires bluntness, and makes use of it on occasion,
he also understands the use of crafting one's words in order to be
persuasive in the public square. It is this part of <i>Up From Liberalism</i> that I found to be the most compelling.<br />
<br />
On pages 139-140 -<br />
<i>“...
conservatives have cheapened the vocabulary of caution - by defying the
rhetorical maxim that one does not cry ‘Wolf!' every day, and expect
the community to heed one’s cries the day the wolf actually materializes
... Conservatives, as a minority, must learn to agonize more
meticulously.</i><br />
<br />
<i>... if we permit ourselves to go on saying the same things about the
imminence of catastrophe - if we become identified with the point of
view that the social security laws toll the knell of our departed
freedoms, or that national bankruptcy will take place the month after
next - we will, like the Seventh Day adventists who close down the
curtain of the world every season or so, lose our credit at the bar of
public opinion ...</i><i>"</i><br />
<br />
One is reminded of talking heads like Sean Hannity, who claim to speak
for conservatism today, interviewing the likes of Michele Bachmann,
who was supposed to be a front-runner Republican candidate for president -<br />
<br />
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Bachmann: <i>“We are headed down the lane of economic Marxism, more
quickly, Sean, than anyone could have possibly imagined. It's difficult
for us to even keep up with it day to day ... At this point the American
people - it's like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and
then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by
that, what I mean, an orderly revolution -- where the people of this
country wake up, get up and make a decision that this is not going to
happen on their watch ...<br />
<br />
“Economics works equally in any country. Where freedom is tried, the
people rejoice. But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack
Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn ... Right now I'm a member
of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign
correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to
understand, this isn't a game. this isn't just a political talk show
that's happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230
years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to
the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. ... Do
we get into an inner tube and float 90 miles to some free country? There
is no free country for us to repair to. That's why it's up to us now.
The founders gave everything they had to give us this freedom. Now it's
up to us to give everything we can to make sure that our kids are free,
too. It's that serious. I hate to be dramatic, but-"</i><br />
<br />
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Hannity: <i>“It's not - you are not overstating this case, Congresswoman, and you don't need to apologize for it. And as a matter of fact, it's refreshing. And I can tell you, all around this country, on 535 of the best radio stations in this country, people are saying ‘Amen!' ‘Hallelujah!' ‘where have you been?'"</i><br />
<br />
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One would satirically imagine Hannity playing R.E.M's “It's the End of the World as We Know It" in the background if one weren't afraid that he, in reality, might actually have done so. Buckley frowns upon the tendency of alarmists on our side to decry liberal or socialist programs as the end of the world.<br />
<br />
pg. 158<br />
<i>“Conservatives have not ‘proved' to the satisfaction ... of the public ... that the moderate welfare state has paralyzing economic or political consequences for the affluent society. Our insistence that the economic comeuppance is just around the corner (not this corner, that one. No, not that one, that one over there ...) has lost to conservatism public confidence in its economic expertise."</i><br />
<br />
As an example, Buckley looks at the conservative failure to argue against Social Security laws.<br />
<br />
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pgs. 151-152<br />
<i>“... if it can be shown that the economic consequences of a single federal social service are negligible, then it follows that the economic consequences of a second social service can be negligible; and perhaps a third, and so on. In a word, I am arguing that to a far greater extent than where philosophical values are the point at issue, the economic meaning of a social security measure is quantitatively measurable. A hundred billion dollar economy with federal social security running a deficit of, say, ten million, can be argued to have become able to ‘afford' a further social service with the same contemplated operating deficit (say federal medical insurance) when its earnings are up to two hundred billion, a federal housing program might become ‘feasible' - with economic dislocations no greater, proportionately, than they were back in the days when it was only social security."</i><br />
<br />
A strong economy will not be immediately destroyed by socialist programs. So by predicting the collapse of the United States, conservatives belittle their own economic arguments and underestimate the strength of the American economy, as well as the longevity of an originally free market run society if put under gradual socialist encroachment. The arguments we ought to be making are <i>not</i> that President Obama is the equivalent to Vladimir Lenin, nor that it is impossible to live under socialist government (many Europeans have been doing so for decades without turning into third world countries). Buckley here was using social security as one example of a welfare state encroachment. The bad conservative arguments made back in the 1950s against social security are the same bad arguments being made against Obamacare today.<br />
<br />
- still on page 152 -<br />
<i>“The social security program has been criticized, among other things, as certain to induce national insolvency. It will not, as presently projected; and it is not likely ever to cause it. It may cause other things ... but not that; and one must distinguish."</i><br />
<br />
Lamentably, such reasonable distinctions are no longer the habit of current voices who claim to be speaking for the conservative position. For example -<i></i><br />
<br />
Glenn Beck - <br />
<i>“I called in all of the producers. I called
in all the heads of my company, and we sat in a room and we listened to
Americans describe how they were going to take down a major U.S. bank in
May and how they were going to collapse the stock market and bring on a
second economic collapse, how this could not appear to be coordinated
and could not appear to be coordinated or union‑backed, how the unions
were dead and the only way to really restart the unions is to collapse
the system ... You must alert all of your friends. Whenever you hear
someone say there’s plenty of money, it’s just in the wrong hands or
it’s just in the hands of these greedy bankers, you know they’re part of
this strategy. Have you heard anyone say we have plenty of money? ...</i><br />
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<br />
<i>“I’d rather be laughed at, called a conspiracy freak, et cetera, et cetera and save the country ... You can call it a conspiracy theory, but ... wait until you see how they are going to use the state and county and local labor unions to do exactly what they did to the housing market. It’s the same tactic, gang. The same tactic. And it ends with the destruction of the economic system of the United States of America. They are bringing it on through chaos and bringing down of Wall Street and the stock market."</i><br />
<br />
It's probably unfair to compare Glenn Beck's rhetoric to William F. Buckley's. After all, Beck has <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/232435/beck-and-birchers-daniel-foster">his roots in the John Birch Society</a>.
But, his polarizing, doom-prediction mode of argument is not different
from that of a large number of modern excuses for conservatives.<br />
<br />
But let's take this a step further. Now that the Tea Party is embracing
the teachings of Ayn Rand, how does the conservative position look?
The oldest critique of capitalism for its selfish materialism was by
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and their criticisms did not go
unnoticed. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that capitalism creates what is
essentially slave labor. It was Che Guevara, held up as a hero today,
who declared that capitalism was <i>“a contest among wolves. One can win only at the cost of the failure of others."</i>
Modern influential economists like Paul Krugman write of what they
call “market failure" when the pursuit of self-interest of one
individual results in hurting society as a whole (e.g., Enron). Noam
Chomsky wrote that selfishness in the marketplace simply “privatizes
tyranny." Simply as a matter of rhetorical awareness, why on earth
wouldn't conservatives avoid gruff philosophers, like Rand, who come
along insisting upon declaring how virtuous it is to be selfish?<br />
<br />
pg. 141 -<br />
<i>“The conservative demonstration, at the hands of
the old guard, has not been made successfully, in part because
conservatism was made to sound by its enemies, frequently with the aid
of its friends, like a crassly materialist position, unconcerned except
with the world of getting and spending ... The conservative movement in
America has got to put its theoretical house in order. A day-to-day
conservatism of expediency will only carry us from day to day,
hazardously, at best."</i><br />
<br />
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We don't need the likes of Ayn Rand and her “Virtue of Selfishness", or
the John Birch Society with its conspiracy theories, or Murray Rothbard
advocating that privatization ought to be extended even to the military,
or Ron Paul opposing Paul Ryan's “Path to Prosperity" proposal on the
grounds that it doesn't correctly follow the principles of Murray
Rothbard. If some of these sorts are endearing, they also get in the
way and obstruct our ability to make reasoned arguments to the public.
We don't need these obstructions as allies because we have other things,
like oh say, history, on our side.<br />
<br />
pg. 142 - <br />
<i>“Not only have the old guard conservatives failed
in making the demonstration successfully, the Moderns also have failed.
Not only by failing to come up with useful definitions, but by failing
to take advantage of their strategic opportunity, while occupying the
center of the stage, to direct the attention of the nation to the solid
advantages to be got from turning back the clock, as it was turned back,
so profitably, by Abraham Lincoln when he freed the slaves, by England
when she repudiated socialism after seven years of it, by West Germany
when, in 1948, she decided to get out of the way of the marketplace."</i><br />
<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Name one single country in the history of the world that turned wealthy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism">as a result of</a> forming a socialist welfare state. There are none. Read about the history of socialism in worldwide economics, and you'll find that socialist economic policies slow and restrict the free market (and economic growth). This is not a hard position to take and we don't need to go to extremes in order to take it.<br />
<br />
pg. 143 -<br />
<i>“Who says government cannot look after the health
of the people ‘better' than they can themselves? Conservatives say so,
liberals tend to disagree. Shouldn’t the two forces advance theoretical
directives that reflect the divergence?"</i><br />
<br />
pg. 146 -<br />
<i>“...
our position, adequately defined, is not materialistic, and is not
‘hard to defend,' and is not burdened by a primary appeal to the
‘selfish in man' ..."</i><br />
<br />
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Just so we're clear, if you support or decide to vote for Ron Paul in the next presidential election, you are making yourself worse than politically useless. Ron Paul's libertarian positions are easy to take, because they simply ignore the understanding of how to reach anyone who isn't already of your own persuasion. Conservative positions only win by effective persuasion. Ron Paul is doing his best to muddy these positions, distract from them, and abscond with a certain number of otherwise conservative votes that may even be necessary to ensure a real conservative candidate actually defeats a non-conservative candidate in the upcoming Republican primary.<br />
<br />
Buckley repeatedly insists that <i>how</i> you choose to make your argument matters.<br />
<br />
pgs. 155-156 -<br />
<i>“A
libertarian theorist has no difficulty in clinching his theoretical
case against the social security laws - he has merely to state simply
that the program has the effect of abridging a freedom unnecessarily.
But the flesh-and-blood dissident has earthier problems ... The
oppressed minority, if it is asking for relief by the majority, must
find a way of stating its case compellingly. Otherwise, the majority is
not likely to inconvenience itself."</i><br />
<br />
We don't need to goof around trying to call selfishness good, or trying
to explain how libertarian utopia would be better, instead we can make a
simpler argument from political philosophy 101.<br />
<br />
pg. 156 -<br />
<i>“Conservatives have failed to alert the community
to the interconnection between economic freedom and - freedom. No
government would dare be so abusive as ours is of our economic freedoms
if we were alive to the relationship. It is a part of the conservative
intuition that economic freedom is the most precious temporal freedom,
for the reason that it alone gives to each one of us, in our comings and
goings in our complex society, sovereignty - and over that part of
existence in which by far the most choices have in fact to be made, and
in which it is possible to make choices, involving oneself, without
damage to other people. And for the further reason that without
economic freedom, political and other freedoms are likely to be taken
from us."</i><br />
<br />
pgs 157-158 -<br />
<i>“Let the
individual keep his dollar - however few he is able to save - and he can
indulge his taste (and never mind who had a role in shaping it) in
houses, in doctors, in education, in groceries, in entertainment, in
culture, in religion; give him the right of free speech or the right to
go to the polling booth, and at best he contributes to a collective
determination, contributes as a general rule an exiguous voice. Give me
the right to spend my dollars as I see fit - to devote them, as I see
fit, to travel, to food, to learning, to taking pleasure, to
polemicizing, and, if I must make the choice, I will surrender you my
political franchise in trade, confident that by the transaction,
assuming the terms of the contract are that no political decision
affecting my sovereignty over my dollar can be made, I shall have
augmented my dominance over my own affairs.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“That is the demonstration, surely, that the conservatives need to
make, before we are overwhelmed; but how pitiful have been our efforts,
how tragic our failure. How vulnerable our desire for economic freedom
to the devastating indictment of materialism. It is widely felt that
the right of property is a rich-man’s concern, that the Cadillac he
hungers after is the fullest expression of that freedom. How widely it
is assumed that societies can, without damage to the metaphysical base
of freedom, do away with Cadillacs. Thus have they framed the argument:
you have nothing to lose, by our depredations on economic freedom, but a
few Cadillacs."</i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
Get that? Economic freedom is <i>directly</i> tied to political
freedom. Remember life, liberty and property? Well, the freedom to use
your property (dollars, wealth, etc.) directly affects your rights to
your own life and liberty. Freedom to spend your cash as you wish,
allows you to exert your liberty for the good of your life. Slowly and
gradually encroach upon the right of property, and the government slowly
and gradually encroaches upon the rights of life and liberty at the
same time.<br />
<br />
This is an argument we can make without “crying wolf."<br />
<br />
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pg. 159 -<br />
<i>“Until the
objection to involuntary participation in social security reifies in the
public mind as something more than a ritualistic exercise in
libertarian crankiness, we are not going to set the nation marching to
our rescue."</i><br />
<br />
The
conservative position is essentially a philosophical one. We oppose
single government encroachments upon American freedom out of a matter of
principle.<br />
<br />
pg. 160 -<br />
<i>“What all conservatives
in this country fear, and have plenty of reason to fear, is the loss of
freedom by attrition. It is therefore for the most realistic reasons,
as well as those of principle, that we must resist every accretion of
power by the state, even while guarding our rhetoric against such
exaggerations as equating social security with slavery."</i><br />
<br />
pg. 160-161 -<br />
<i>“The failure of the conservative demonstration in political affairs rests primarily on our failure to convince that the establishment of the welfare state entails the surrender, bit by bit, of minor freedoms which, added together, can alter the very shape of our existence.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“The tendencies of liberalism are every day more visibly coercive, as the social planners seek more and more brazenly to impose their preferences upon us. Here, I believe, is a practical distinction at which conservatives should hammer hard - the distinction between the kind of welfarism that turns dollars over to people, and that which turns services over to them ...In the first instance, the recipient of the money is free to allocate it according to his own lights, to satisfy his own needs and pleasures according to his own estimate of their priority. There are the obvious perils, that he will stress whiskey rather than milk, television over education; but these are the perils of liberty, with which conservatives are prepared to live ... I judge this to be significant, because as long as one is free to spend the money with reference to one's desires, the government's control is at least once removed."</i><br />
<br />
Remember, economically, our country can afford quite a bit of socialism. Enacting into law socialist misunderstandings of economics hurts us, and detracts from economic growth, but the argument to make is not that we can't afford it. The argument to make is that it's both unwise and wrong. Gradual accumulation of power by the federal government is not the direction in which any American should want to keep traveling. And what if some Americans argue they feel freer because of the “security" provided to them by a welfare state?<br />
<br />
pg. 162 -<br />
<i>“The problem having been pondered over in the context of economic realities, the wise man will conclude that the best way to make medicine widely available is to make wealth widely available, and in turn the best way to do that is to liberate the economic system from statist impositions.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“I think the conservative has the best of the argument when he maintains that security does not equal freedom, even though he admits that freedom is also for the eccentric. Objective standards of freedom must not be lost sight of, in our indulgence of the eccentric. If a man feels free in prison, we must simultaneously acknowledge his right to feel free, and declare that he is not free. If the people announce that they feel freer by virtue of the securities extended by the welfare state, we must be prepared to concede what they authoritatively tell us about their state of mind - yet insist, doggedly, that we strive after an objectively free society."</i><br />
<br />
pg. 163 -<br />
<i>“As far as state welfare is concerned, there is a long enough historical record of it to establish that relatively affluent societies given to a measure of state welfarism can extend their economic lives over an impressive period of time without collapsing from exhaustion ... It is quite possibly true that through such measures as federal social security we sow seeds that could lead to economic destruction; but then it is also true that being born with Original Sin is a poor way to start out in life. Social security will not necessarily bring economic collapse - it is merely a step in the wrong direction; a departure from sound principles of government. To insist doctrinally that it will bring disaster is to weaken the case for conservatism, and make difficult the conservative demonstration."</i><br />
<br />
A lesson still <i>NOT</i> learned by Ron Paul, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Mike Gallagher, and Tucker Carlson, among others.<br />
<br />
Buckley wants to direct conservatives towards a union over certain principles, even if those principles are not much more than reasonable objections to socialistic policy.<br />
<br />
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pg 167 -<br />
<i>“At the political level, conservatives are bound together for the most part by negative response to liberalism; but altogether too much is made of that fact. Negative action is not necessarily of negative value. Political freedom's principal value is negative in character. The people are politically stirred principally by the necessity for negative affirmations. Cincinnatus was a farmer before he took up the sword, and went back to farming after wielding some highly negative strokes upon the pates of those who sought to make positive changes in his way of life."</i><br />
<br />
Buckley then tells a story that serves as an example of the kind of thinking we are up against, starting on page 172 and going to 173 -<br />
<br />
<i>“The direction we must travel requires a broadmindedness that, in the modulated age, strikes us as antiquarian and callous. As I write there is mass suffering in Harlan County, Kentucky, where coal mining has become unprofitable, and a whole community is desolate. The liberal solution is: immediate and sustained federal subsidies. The conservative, breasting the emotional surf, will begin by saying that it was many years ago foreseeable that coal mining in Harlan County was becoming unprofitable, that the humane course would have been to face up to that realism by permitting the marketplace, through the exertion of economic pressures of mounting intensity, to require resettlement. That was not done for the coal miners (they were shielded from reality by a combination of state and union aid) ... But having made arrangements for relief, what then? Will the grandsons of the Harlan coal miners be mining coal, to be sold to the government at a pegged price, all this to spare today's coal miners the ordeal of looking for other occupations? ...</i><br />
<br />
<i> </i><i>The Hoover Commission on government reorganization unearthed several
years ago a little rope factory in Boston, Massachusetts, which had been
established by the federal government during the Civil War to
manufacture the textile specialities the Southern blockade had caused to
be temporarily scarce. There it was, ninety years after Appomattox,
grinding out the same specialties, which are bought by the government,
and then sold at considerable loss. ‘Liquidate the plant,' the Hoover
Commission was getting ready to recommend. Whereupon a most influential
Massachusetts Senator, Mr. John F. Kennedy, interceded. ‘You cannot,'
he informed a member of the Commission, ‘do so heinous a thing. The
plant employs 136 persons, whose only skill is in making this
specialty.' ‘Very well them' said the spokesman for the Commission,
anxious to cooperate, ‘Suppose we recommend to the Government that the
factory retain in employment every single present employee until he
quits, retires, or dies - but on the understanding that none of them is
to be replaced. That way we can at least look forward to the eventual
liquidation of the plant. Otherwise, there will be 136 people making
useless specialities generations hence; an unreasonably legacy of the
Civil War.'</i><br />
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<i>The Senator was unappeased. What a commotion the proposal would cause in the textile-specialty enclave in Boston! The solution, he warned the Commission, was intolerable, and he would resist it with all his prodigious political might.<br />
<br />
The relationship of forces being what it is, the factory continues to operate at full force.<br />
<br />
To be sure, a great nation can indulge its little extravagances, as I have repeatedly stressed; but a long enough series of little extravagances, as I have also said, can add up to a stagnating if not a crippling economic overhead. What is disturbing about the Civil War factory incident is first the sheer stupidity of the thing, second the easy victory of liberal sentimentalism over reason."</i><br />
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Buckley is hitting on a problem that conservatives are still seemingly incompetent against today. Liberal economic arguments are always allowed to take the moral high ground. They are the ones always arguing for helping the poor and needy, and for forming our economic decisions upon humane principles. The proposition no one seems to be explaining anymore is that economic growth is what helps the poor and needy more than any other occurrence in history. The poor will always be with us, but they will be considerably less poor in a nation of wealth. Most of the occupants of slums in the big American cities have, unlike the impoverished of other nations, their own cell phones, widescreen TVs, cable and internet, and a quality of life superior to that of your average American frontiersman over a century ago. In a recession, the question is “what best gets a country out of a recession?" The answer is not welfare or government subsidy, much less increased government control.<br />
<br />
pg. 173-174 -<br />
<i>“There is a sophisticated argument that has to do with the conceivable economic beneficences of pyramid building, and of hiring men to throw rocks out into the sea. But even these proposals, when advanced rhetorically by Lord Keynes, were meliorative and temporary in concept: the idea was to put the men to work until the regenerative juices of the economy had done their work. Now we wake to the fact that along the line we abandoned our agreement to abide, as a general rule, by the determinations of the marketplace. We once believed that useless textile workers and useless coal miners and useless farmers - and useless carriagemakers and pony expressmen - should search out other means of employment ...</i><br />
<br />
<i>“Centralize the political function, and you will lose touch with reality, for the reality is an intimate and individualized relationship between individuals and those among whom they live; and the abstractions of wide-screen social draftsmen will not substitute for it. Stifle the economic sovereignty of the individual by spending his dollars for him, and you stifle freedom. Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness; you cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters."</i><br />
<br />
Inefficiency is multiplied whenever the government takes control of more wealth. Government control of more of the nation's wealth seems to have been the first priority of the current Presidential administration from the beginning. As the results and consequences are only beginning, more and more Americans are capable of being persuaded over to the political philosophy of conservatism. This demands the mastery of the art of persuasion by the modern conservative, an art the majority seems to have misplaced somewhere on their way to work. We would all do well to heed the words and the rhetorical example given us by William F. Buckley. His ability to articulate these ideas is an ability every conservative ought to cultivate.<br />
<br />
pg. 175 -<br />
<i>“Boston can surely find a way to employ gainfully
its 136 textile specialists - and its way would be very different,
predictably, from Kentucky's with the coal miners; and let them be
different. Let the two localities experiment with different solutions,
and let the natural desire of the individual for more goods, and better
education, and more leisure, find satisfaction in individual encounters
with the marketplace, in the growth of private schools, in the myriad
economic and charitable activities which, because they took root in the
individual imagination and impulse, take organic form. And then let us
see whether we are better off than we would be living by decisions made
between nine and five in Washington office rooms, where the oligarchs of
the Affluent Society sit, allocating complaints and solutions to
communities represented by pins on the map."</i><br />
<br />
In summary, <i>Up From Liberalism </i>is a primer on arguments that today's conservatives have forgotten. It needs to be read and then re-read again.<i></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
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J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-80207327545365939612013-08-28T21:13:00.001-07:002014-02-25T19:12:20.200-08:00Sleaze, Dreck, Distraction and Yellow Journalism<i>These are the ills the teeming Press supplies,<br />The pois'nous springs from learning's fountain rise;<br />Not there the wise alone their entrance find,<br />Imparting useful light to mortals blind;<br />But, blind themselves, these erring guides hold out<br />Alluring lights to lead us far about;<br />Screen'd by such means, here Scandal whets her quill,<br />Here Slander shoots unseen, whene'er she will;<br />Here Fraud and Falsehood labour to deceive,<br />And Folly aids them both, impatient to believe ...<br />To these a thousand idle themes succeed,<br />Deeds of all kinds, and comments to each deed ...</i><br />
<i></i><b>- George Crabbe, 1785</b><i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>Picture magazines and tabloid newspapers place before the millions scenes and facts which violate every definition of humanity ... The rise of sensational journalism everywhere testified to man's loss of points of reference, to his determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is being sacrified to titillation. The extremes of passion and suffering are served to enliven the breakfast table or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home.</i><br />
<b>- Richard Weaver, 1948</b><br />
<br />
<i>I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry; schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.</i><br />
<b> - Neil Postman, 1985</b><br />
___________________________________________________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
Whoever it was who said that “a news story should be like a mini skirt
on a pretty woman; long enough to cover the subject but short enough to
be interesting” was adept at humor but unaccomplished in the art of the
analogy. The presumption that the length of a story can, in and of
itself, make the story uninteresting simply isn’t true. Unlike the mini
skirt, whose charm lies directly in proportion to what it does and does not reveal, the good news story can very often reveal far
more by not reducing itself to mere bite-sized banality.<br />
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Unfortunately, the reason this analogy with women’s clothing came to mind is because, early yesterday morning, I was attempting to read news coverage of the possibility that the United States may take military action in Syria. It appears that the government of Syria just used chemical weapons to kill hundreds of its own people (hurting thousands of others). Now, when you are leading the world’s greatest military superpower, whether you like it or not, you have certain <i>de facto</i> responsibilities. If you hold this responsibility, then you ought to draw a few lines about what is and what is not tolerated. And this is precisely what the United States has done. As a matter of Foreign Policy and International Law, we have drawn lines - and one such line is against the use of chemical weapons. If there are no consequences when a line like this is crossed, then we lose our ability to effect a principled leadership around the world. Such international influence derives, partly, from the absence of empty talk and transparent bluffing.<br />
<br />
So now our government is considering military action in Syria.<br />
<br />
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with whether we ought to act, all of us can agree that doing so is an inherently risky proposition. Given the instability of the region, given that there are countries like Iran who are always seeking an excuse to fight back against perceived Western encroachment by, oh say, attacking Israel, given that Israel has repeatedly warned that they will use nuclear weapons to defend themselves, given Russia’s friendly relations with Iran, given that Assad’s regime does actually hold back more fanatical Muslim military elements as well as Al-Qaeda, given that Assad’s military possesses chemical weapons, given that weakening Assad’s military could potentially subject said chemical weapons to the changing of hands, given that Al-Qaeda would use all chemical weapons they could get their hands on, given that bombing chemical weapon stores could kill more civilians than Assad has already killed, given that any American military intervention in the Middle East always risks war on a global scale ... this is a deadly and serious matter.<br />
<br />
So as I was browsing through news headlines about Syria on Google’s news feed, I chose one from <i>The Huffington Post</i> entitled, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-glaser/obamas-war-of-choice-in-s_b_3822652.html">“Obama’s War of Choice in Syria Isn’t Defensive or Humanitarian,”</a> by a Mr. John Glaser. I did this early yesterday morning (which, for future reference, was on August 27th, 2013) at the time during which our government was preparing and considering whether to act. <i>The Huffington Post</i> is a liberally slanted news source. Indeed, Mr. Glaser’s anti-war article on the possibility of military action in Syria is from a liberal point of view. But it is generally helpful to read news from both conservative <i>and</i> liberal points of view and, besides, over the years I have found the writers at <i>The Huffington Post</i> to be somewhat more educated and less hysterical than the reporters that you’d find over at <i>CNN</i> or <i>MSNBC</i>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Huffington_Post">Wikipedia introduces and describes <i>The Huffington Post</i> as follows:</a><br />
<br />
<i>The Huffington Post is an online news aggregator and blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, Andrew Breitbart, and Jonah Peretti, featuring columnists. The site offers news, blogs, and original content and covers politics, business, entertainment, environment, technology, popular media, lifestyle, culture, comedy, healthy living, women’s interests, and local news. The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005, as a liberal/left commentary outlet and alternative to news aggregators such as the Drudge Report ... In July 2012, The Huffington Post was ranked #1 on the 15 Most Popular Political Sites list by eBizMBA Rank, which bases its list on each site’s Alexa Global Traffic Rank and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast.</i><br />
<br />
But, upon beginning to read Mr. Glaser's column, I confess that I was distracted.<br />
<br />
I did not, in fact, actually read through and finish his respectable, reasoned, and somewhat mistaken column until hours later. Now granted, I was also distracted by the thoughts that produced this essay, but let’s consider the facts. First of all, poor Mr. Glaser has been shoved over to the left hand side of the webpage upon which his written text only fills less than two-thirds of the space. Intruding upon and, specifically designed to contrast with, the written text are twenty good sized full color photographs drawing the eye of the reader with links underneath them virtually shouting the following stories:<br />
<br />
“Miley Cyrus Bleeped by MTV,”<br />
“Billy Ray Cyrus Reacts to Miley’s VMAs Performance,”<br />
“Lady Gaga Gets VMA ‘Applause’,”<br />
“NYSNC Reportedly ‘Upset’ with Justin Timberlake,”<br />
“Taylor Swift Tells Harry Styles: ‘STFU’,”<br />
“Lamar Odom Reportedly Missing, Abusing Drugs,”<br />
“Rihanna’s Priceless Reation To Spilling Popcorn,”<br />
“Jessica Biel Shows Lots O’Skin In See-Through Dress,”<br />
“PHOTOS: Check Out VMAs Red Carpet Fashion From The 2013 Show,”<br />
“Study Reveals Terrifying Side-Effect Of Cocaine - After Just One Use,”<br />
“Lady Gaga’s Butt Make Full Appearance [sic] At VMAs”<br />
and<br />
“Katy Perry Performs ‘Roar’ For The First Time.”<br />
<br />
Then, by the time you have scrolled through the right-hand photos, there is, under Mr. Glaser's column with the heading, “You May Like,” six more links, with accompanying color photographs, to the following:<br />
<br />
“Dads React To Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance,”<br />
“Rihanna, One Direction Not Impressed With Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance,”<br />
“Mayim Bialik’s Condition After Severe Car Accident,”<br />
“Stunning Pictures of Kate Middleton,”<br />
“The Sneakiest Way to Make a Fortune,”<br />
“5 Questions That Will Not Get You Hired.”<br />
<br />
In summary, not counting the photo above Mr. Glaser’s column of what appears to be a rebel armed with an RPG, there were 26 large color photos surrounding the text with accompanying links. We can also predictably tabulate them as follows:<br />
- number of photos/links concerning pop celebrities (including “Stunning Pictures of Kate Middleton”): <b>21 of 26</b><br />
- number of photos/links concerning either the body parts or lack of clothing of women: <b>12 of 26</b><br />
- number of photos/links concerning Miley Cyrus taking her clothes off: <b>7 of 26</b><br />
- number of photos/links having anything to do Syria: <b>0 of 26</b><br />
- number of photos/links having anything, anything at all remotely to do with politics: <b>0 of 26</b><br />
- number of photos actually displaying undressed women alongside Mr. Glaser’s column: <b>6 of 26</b><br />
<br />
<i>The Huffington Post</i> is allegedly a political news website. They are supposedly serious about their discussion of the news. Now sure, they also do have <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entertainment/">an Entertainment section</a>, where one can currently read delightful news stories like “Shailene Woodley’s Adorable On-Set Selfie,” “Jared Leto Blasts MTV,” “The Top 10 Worst Video Music Awards Outfits of All Time” and “Inside Corey Feldman’s Sex Party.” Whatever the hell “Entertainment News” is, that is apparently ... it. But I hadn't opened up the Entertainment section. I was trying to read political and international news, which is what I thought <i>The Huffington Post</i> was for.<br />
<br />
Perhaps, I reasoned, this was just a momentary lapse or glitch, and somehow all the popular pop celebrity obsessed links and photos were not usually intruding into the space of a political columnist’s text. Further investigation revealed the lapse/glitch theory to be too much to be hoped for. The same popular links and photos were next to every single political article on the website. Given the importance of the news about Syria, I tried <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/"><i>The Huffington Post</i>’s front page</a>. On the front page was the headline, “France ‘Ready To Punish’ Syria” with other related news links below it.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Directly below <i>that</i> was a large collection of discordant and jarringly mismatched news links and photos along the lines of “WATCH: Mika Rages Against MTV AGAIN,” “Why Sharon Stone Is Urging Younger Actresses To Get Naked,” “What Robin Thicke’s Wife Thought About Miley,” “Syria Vows To Defend Itself Using ‘All Means Available’,” “Kourtney Kardashian Half-Naked In New Instagram Photo,” “WATCH: Journalist Goes Topless During Interview With Mayor” and quite a few others of similar absurdity. All these stories were all together. All of them were on the single front page of <i>The Huffington Post</i>’s website. This is the political news website of a nationally and widely read American news source.<br />
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<br />
This sort of thing brings up bad memories. As a member of the United States Army Reserves, I served a year’s tour of duty in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. I was there in country when Saddam Hussein was executed. I was essentially a part of General David Petraeus’s troop surge which led to one of the deadliest months in Iraq since earlier in 2004. There was much to be concerned about in global and national affairs. At that time, Israel was fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon. North Korea had just detonated its first nuclear bomb. General John Abizaid was warning the world that the escalating violence in Iraq might cause a civil war. The Taliban made an assassination attempt on the president of Pakistan. We had heard rumors through our command that British intelligence had just stopped another terrorist attack designed to use liquid explosives in commercial international airlines.<br />
<br />
When I was in Iraq, there was also cause to be concerned about back home. The housing bubble had burst. Defaults on subprime mortgages were on the rise (up 93% from just a year before). New Century Financial had already filed for bankruptcy. The Virginia Tech shooting happened. And my childhood baseball hero, Barry Bonds, was being indicted unjustly (I still believe) for perjury about his using steriods.<br />
<br />
<b>No Longer News </b><br />
<br />
When you are in the middle of an overseas deployment, one of the things you greatly and deeply desire is news from back home. We didn’t always have time to sit around watching the news, so any glimpse (in between missions or in the chow hall) of news about life back in America was dearly treasured. I still remember being able to have precious time to spend watching CNN or FoxNews. And I still remember the bitter disappointment we all continually felt whenever we saw <i>what</i> the news anchors were spending most of their time reporting. I still remember because I began to write down a list of the news stories I was given by American popular news media in between my missions. Thus, while I served my tour of duty in Iraq, I learned that:<br />
<br />
(1) there was now this new something called a smartphone or an “iPhone.”<br />
(2) Britney Spears shaved her head<br />
(3) other pop celebrities had opinions about how Britney Spears's shaved head made them feel<br />
(4) Lindsey Lohan was sometimes not sober<br />
(5) Lindsey Lohan was arrested for a DUI and drug possession<br />
(6) Lindsey Lohan went to rehab<br />
(7) other pop celebrities had opinions about how Lindsey Lohan made them feel <br />
(8) Paris Hilton, at approximately the same time, released a new album and went to prison<br />
(9) Madonna adopted a kid from Malawi<br />
(10) Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie had a baby<br />
(11) Tom Cruse & Katie Holmes were married in some kind of Scientology ceremony<br />
(12) there were now photographs on the internet of a naked Vanessa Hudgins<br />
(13) Paul McCartney broke up with his one-legged wife<br />
(14) Dora the Explorer toys made in China were being recalled <br />
<br />
Those are the major news stories I remember seeing talked about interminably on major national news networks playing in the chow halls of U.S. Army bases up and down Iraq from 2006-2007. This was the dreck mass media was giving to our fighting men and women overseas hungry for news of back home.<br />
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I suppose that none of us should be surprised by now. It’s not like pop celebrity news media is anything new. I haven’t yet really helped you, the reader, to learn anything new. All the way back in 1888, Matthew Arnold wrote: “If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.” “The sensations purveyed by the press,” wrote Richard M. Weaver in 1948, “are admittedly for the <i>demos</i>, which is careless of understanding but avid of thrills.” “Notice, too,” wrote Bernard Iddings Bell in 1952, “how brazenly the press violates proper rights to privacy, even in cases of deep sorrow or pitiable weakness; how it encourages its readers to be Peter Prys and Peeping Toms. See especially how it vulgarizes the nobilities inherent in marriage, in birth, in death.”<br />
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“Pitiable weakness” might just describe the embarrassment of a 20-year-old girl who, for no other reason than that she has been raised from since the time she was a little girl inside the world of television and public display, just made a display of undressing herself. But such a thing is not, anymore in our mass media world, properly speaking, a news story. It is not a news story, that is, until a celebrity and sex obsessed media salivates over her and sensationalizes her performance and all and any hostile reactions to it. “And so,” wrote Neil Postman in 1985, “we move rapidly into an information environment which may rightly be called trivial pursuit. As the game of that name uses facts as a source of amusement, so does our sources of news.” Looking at all the links and headlines trying to attract the attention of the reader’s eye over at <i>The Huffington Post</i>, trivial is just the right word to describe them. “We do not,” declared Chris Hedges in 2009, “learn more about Barack Obama by knowing what dog he has brought home for his daughters or if he still smokes. Such personalized trivia, passed off as news, divert us from reality.”<br />
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The rise of sensationalist trivial and banal news media was thus predicted by thinkers watching the spirit of the age. As industrialization grew, conservative romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were able to predict what would happen to journalism as it became increasingly subject only to popular mass consumer demand. In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lay-Sermons-Samuel-Taylor-Coleridge/dp/1103074938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377662974&sr=8-1&keywords=A+Lay+Sermon+Coleridge"><i>A Lay Sermon</i></a> in 1817, Coleridge wrote:<br />
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“Every work which can be made use of either to immediate profit or immediate pleasure, every work which falls in with the desire of acquiring wealth suddenly, of which can gratify the senses, or pamper the still more degrading appetite for scandal and personal defamation, is sure of an appropriate circulation.”<br />
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Coleridge here describes everything the world of MTV stands for. We are still in the process of losing our virtues. One of the old conservative intellects of what is now a former age, Richard M. Weaver, in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Have-Consequences-Richard-Weaver/dp/0226876802/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377663365&sr=8-1&keywords=ideas+have+consequences+by+richard+weaver"><i>Ideas Have Consequences</i></a>, commented upon the growing cultural trends that we are now experiencing in full grown form today. One of the virtues lost in today’s mass media was called propriety, an idea that many would now laugh at. Weaver wrote:<br />
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“Propriety, like other old-fashioned anchorages, was abandoned because it inhibited something. Proud of its shamelessness, the new journalism served up in swaggering style matter which heretofore had been veiled in decent taciturnity.” (pg. 28.)<br />
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<b>Increased Fragmentation of Thinking (or Mass Schizophrenia)</b><br />
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What does it mean to lose the virtue of propriety? One of the consequences is that, according to Weaver, “we are made to grow accustomed to the weirdest of juxtapositions: the serious and the trivial, the comic and the tragic, follow one another in mechanical sequence without real transition.” (pg. 102.) Of course, Weaver was thinking only of radio and newspapers in 1948. Neil Postman, in his 1985 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377663938&sr=1-1&keywords=amusing+ourselves+to+death"><i>Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business</i></a>, was able to consider the problem in the age of television.<br />
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Postman titled the seventh chapter of the book, “Now ... This,” and explained how news on the television is reported in a massed jumble with no sense for the propriety of what stories are reported upon as a matter of priority or of order. Postman writes:<br />
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“The American humorist H. Allen Smith once suggested that of all the worrisome words in the English language, the scariest is ‘uh oh,’ as when a physician looks at your X-rays, and with knitted brow says, ‘Uh oh.’ I should like to suggest that the words which are the title of this chapter are as ominous as any, all the more so because they are spoken with knitted brow - indeed, with a kind of idiot's delight. The phrase, if that’s what it may be called, adds to our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything. As such, it serves as a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in present-day America. ‘Now ... this’ is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly - for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening - that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now ... this.’ The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.” (pgs. 99-100.)<br />
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This still describes the reporting over at CNN or at Fox News. It also describes the placement of story photos and links on online news journals and websites. This is the reduction of news into entertainment. The news webpage is glutted with dozens of headlines and photographs all begging for the attention of the reader. Click on any one of them and one arrives at another page with exactly the same distractions as before. When the headline “Syria Vows to Defend Itself Using ‘All Means Available’” is placed right alongside the headline “Kourtney Kardashian Half-Naked In New Instagram Photo,” any sense of importance or value to one story over any other story is diminished. Most of these stories will, at best, fill a quarter of the webpage with actual text. The rest is full of other links and attractions and, at least in the case of <i>The Huffington Post</i> yesterday, pictures of undressed women.<br />
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Postman continues:<br />
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“This perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds. While brevity does not always suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It is simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less than one minute’s time. In fact, it is quite obvious that TV news has no intention of suggesting that any story <i>has</i> any implications, for that would require viewers to continue to think about it when it is done and therefore obstruct their attending to the next story that waits panting in the wings.” (pg. 103.)<br />
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<i>The Huffington Post</i> is not alone in this sort of thing. Yesterday morning, CNN displayed the headline on the front page of their wepage: “U.S: ‘We are ready to go, like that’” [sic] and “Hagel: U.S. forces are ready to move,” thus announcing the possibility of war.<br />
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Almost directly underneath this story block is, explicitly proclaiming both total mindless randomness and electronic devaluation of any story’s worth, the subheading “READ THIS, WATCH THAT” underneath which is a collection of photos and links to stories and videos. Among these stories and videos on the front page of one of the largest news sources in the United States were “In the shower, photo subjects open up,” “Miley, what exactly were you thinking?,” “Giants punter’s abs ridiculously ripped” and “Baby goat does not like what’s in mirror.”<br />
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The banality here is so blatant that it is difficult to explain how this is problem. How important, really, is the above story about the possibility of war when it is placed on CNN’s webpage right next to the below stories? What does this do to our sense of reality, to our sense of the importance of one story over another, to our sensitivity to the real potential for evil and death in the world? Neil Postman was very eloquent upon this phenomena in the case of television commercials:<br />
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“The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of news may appear (for example, on the day I write a Marine Corps general has declared that nuclear war between the United States and Russia is inevitable), it will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal. This is a key element in the structure of a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that television news is designed as a serious form of public discourse. Imagine what you would think of me, and this book, if I were to pause here, tell you that I will return to my discussion in a moment, and then proceed to write a few words in behalf of United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank. You would rightly think that I had no respect for you and, certainly, no respect for the subject. And if I did this not once but several times in each chapter, you would think the whole enterprise unworthy of your attention. Why, then, do we not think a news show similarly unworthy? ... We have become so accustomed to its discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King ...” (pgs. 104-105.)<br />
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And Postman did not yet know about the placement of random internet ads, links, and videos. One of Postman's modern intellectual heirs, Nicholas Carr, wrote a provocative book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377666574&sr=1-1&keywords=the+shallows+nicholas+carr"><i>The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains</i></a>. Carr applies many of the insights of Postman to our use of the internet along with contemporary studies from neuroscience on the different types of thinking engaged in by the human brain.<br />
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The argument is that the design of a webpage affects how we read. Thus the internet has changed the old newspaper forever.<br />
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“When the Net absorbs a medium,” argues Carr, “it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form; it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.”<br />
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Not surprised? Or does the idea, that the medium of the online webpage changes the content of what used to be considered a news story, sound implausible? Carr continues:<br />
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“A page of online text viewed through a computer screen may seem similar to a page of printed text. But scrolling or clicking through a Web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or a magazine. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual. ‘All reading,’ writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, is ‘multi-sensory.’ There’s ‘a crucial link’ between ‘the sensory-motor experience of the materiality’ of a written work and ‘the cognitive processing of the text content.’ The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.<br />
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Hyperlinks also alter our experience of media. Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. But their effect on us as we read is not at all the same. Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them. They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them. Hyperlinks are designed to grab out attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause.” (pg. 90.)<br />
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If you just pause to think about it, the idea that the materiality and the sensory experience of the thing that possesses the text that you read affects how you are able to read it is incredibly fascinating. But here is another thing. This is not an issue that should demand the taking of political sides. Some day a literary neuroscientist is going to write a brilliant argument for why reading the text in a book is far superior to reading the text of a webpage. But the distraction and fragmentation of our news media is not the only problem. This is not just some innocent matter of personal taste or mere entertainment. There are moral dimensions to reporting on certain stories as well. To make the decision to report on “a story” is not value-neutral.<br />
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Deciding to report on a story is a moral choice and anyone who does the reporting is responsible for that choice.<br />
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Deciding to consume a news source is also a moral choice and anyone who patronizes a news source is responsible for that choice.<br />
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<b>The Problem of Yellow Journalism</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57600079/miley-cyrus-booty-shaking-vma-performance-gets-quite-the-reaction/">Lauren Moraski for <i>CBS News</i> reports:</a> “This was one performance that won’t be forgotten very quickly.” Au contraire, Ms. Moraski. Thankfully, a majority of Americans do <i>not</i> watch MTV’s awards shows. We have not seen this performance you are so excitedly telling us about, nor do we plan on seeing your videos of it. “Cyrus, 20, gave Robin Thicke, 36, a lap dance, paraded around with dancing bears, twerked her butt off and grabbed her crotch a few times. Not to mention the tongue. We saw a lot of that. Thicke’s mother, Gloria Loring, told OMG! Insider, ‘I don’t understand what Miley Cyrus is trying to do ...’” It should be obvious, shouldn’t it? Ms. Cyrus is seeking mass media attention and she apparently understands the news media accurately enough to know exactly how to get them to obsess over her. They have now proved her right.<br />
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<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/vmas-2013-celebs-react-miley-cyrus-robin-thicke-performance-article-1.1437027">Chiderah Monde of the <i>New York Daily News</i></a> is excited to report, on a webpage replete with a large number of full body photographs of the undressed Ms. Cyrus, that “Twitter erupted with comments after the performance and even set a new bar. ‘Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke perform’ brought in more than 300,000 tweets per minute, according to date gathered by the social network.” One is still unsure how this is supposed to be news. Those of us who have no reason to use Twitter remain unsurprised that MTV awards watchers are precisely the same people who use Twitter. That those who always tweet are going to be in the habit of setting tweeting records is as uninteresting and as obvious as the information that those who always report on pop celebrity are going to be in the habit of setting pop celebrity reporting records. The <i>New York Daily News</i> is also happy to inform us that while most “comments suggested Cyrus went too far,” the recipient of the lap dance, “Thicke, her grinding partner, didn’t see anything wrong with it. ‘That was dope,” he tweeted afterward.” Yes, that’s right. We now live in a world where comments about the comments about a non-news story is now a news story.<br />
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<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2013/08/27/miley-cyrus-moves-on-with-new-post-vma-racy-photos/2705033/">Ann Oldenburg, of <i>USA Today</i></a>, will not let this rest. In the story entitled “Miley Cyrus moves on with new racy photos: She’s showing her backside again,” Ms. Oldenburg is pleased to report that “While talking heads are still busy clucking about Miley Cyrus’ wild MTV Video Music Awards performance of Sunday night, the star is moving on.” Now USA Today tells us that Ms. Cyrus is “tweeting new photos of herself in provocative poses, all showing her backside.” But just in case we wanted to know, USA Today begins to describe the aforesaid tweeted photos: “First Miley is seen squatting in a red, white and black Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls shorts and bikini bra top. She then followed it up with the shot of herself in a locker room, sporting a thong over white bike pants and the red top ...” Just in case we wanted to see them. USA Today includes a photo gallery with the news story, displaying all of Ms. Cyrus’s new photos for the perusal of any lascivious eye.<br />
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I could continue like this, looking at the coverage that almost every major online news source gave to Ms. Cyrus’s striptease, but those three paragraphs is already too much. (Although, I also refuse to let <i>Fox News</i> off the hook either. <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/26/mommy-whats-miley-cyrus-doing-to-that-teddy-bear/">They self-righteously reported on this too with a play by play</a> of the performance.) This may now be the point where the angry blogger is supposed to launch into his long-winded rant against the scum currently running the news media and MTV. But I’m not going to do that. I don’t need to because I wouldn’t have anything original to say. This is an old problem, not a new one. This is merely yet another example of cheap populism, easy sensationalism and lurid entertainment combined into something that was named “Yellow Journalism” by E.L. Godkin in the late 1800s. Today we just have electronic media to ramp it up. Add a sex-obsessed culture and the objectification of women and the modern day pop celebrity worship and you’ve got MTV. The facts are the facts. Salacious images attract more viewers to any news website more than mere written text will. This has affected who we are as a people.<br />
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Liberal cultural commentator, Chris Hedges, actually nails this in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568586132"><i>Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle</i></a>, in which he explores how mass media has shaped our focus and attention. Hedges writes to explain why real and more serious news stories (like a possible war in Syria) are always going to be less interesting than something more mindless and sensational like sexual exhibitionism on national television:<br />
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“An image-based culture communicates through narratives, pictures, and pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, untimely deaths, train wrecks - these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations, and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who proposes serious regulatory reform or advocates curbing wasteful spending is boring. Kings, queens, and emperors once used their court conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political, and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics, and sports have become, as they were in Nero’s reign, interchangeable. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by cliches, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our attributes or our national character or because we are blessed by God. In this world, all that matters is the consistency of our belief systems. The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.” (pg. 49.)<br />
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Have there really been any lies in the news coverage of the MTV Awards show? Some of us would argue that there have. There are greater feminist thinkers than I who have thought deeply and written eloquently about the harm caused by our mass entertainment’s stereotypes and objectification of women. (See, for example, the excellently reasoned <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Bites-Back-Troubling-Pleasure/dp/1580052657/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377742717&sr=1-2&keywords=reality+tv"><i>Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV</i></a> by Jennifer L. Pozner.) There are better writers of cultural commentary than I who have written about the denials of reality that uncritical acceptance of mass entertainment results in. (See Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, Mark Bauerlein and Alan Jacobs.)<br />
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Or, in order to begin to grasp how modern mass entertainment denies fundamental parts of reality, all one really has to do is to read again about Plato’s Cave in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato-Second/dp/0465069347/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377744385&sr=1-1&keywords=the+republic+plato"><i>The Republic</i></a>.<br />
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Critics of Ms. Cyrus are calling her slanderous names and describing MTV as the destroyer of childhood innocence. This is both unfair and untrue. No one is being forced to watch either MTV or Ms. Cyrus and neither do they <i>have to</i> allow their children to watch them either. Defenders of Ms. Cyrus are defending her act on the grounds that it does not have anything to do with any question of morality at all. This is also misleading.<br />
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The argument that entertainment is divorced from any moral dimension is either naive or harmful. The argument that there is no moral responsibility to a news reporter other than to simply report what has happened is both cowardly and lazy. In his 1917 essay collection, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Usurers-G-K-Chesterton/dp/0971489432/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377743500&sr=1-2&keywords=utopia+of+usurers"><i>Utopia of Ursurers</i></a>, G.K. Chesterton argued “that the moral breakdown of these papers has been accompanied by a mental breakdown also.” Speaking of the ‘Daily News’ and the ‘Daily Chronicle,’ he explained that it is a moral decision to merely cater to the sensational. Because they feel free to treat anything and everything as news, “there is no more curious quality in its degradation than a sort of carelessness, at once of hurry and fatigue, with which it flings down its argument--or rather its refusal to argue. It does not even write sophistry: it writes anything. It does not so much poison the reader's mind as simply assume that the reader hasn't got one.”<br />
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If we believe in the virtues - in things like propriety, prudence, charity, honesty, modesty, moderation, faith, grace or honor - then not just anything should be treated as a news story. Neither ought mere popular demand to determine what is a news story. Popular demand always changes with the passions of men. Irrelevance and triviality can be in demand when that is not what the people need. Social order demands the discernment of value, especially when in the middle of an information flood. Technology is not to blame. But it is technology that allows us access to things we didn’t have access to before, and not all of them are good.<br />
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“The penny newspaper,” wrote Postman, “merging slightly before telegraphy, in the 1830's, had already begun the process of elevating irrelevance to the status of news. Such papers as Benjamin Day’s <i>New York Sun</i> and James Bennett’s <i>New York Herald</i> turned away from the tradition of news as reasoned (if biased) political opinion and urgent commercial information and filled their pages with accounts of sensational events, mostly concerning crime and sex.” (pg. 66.)<br />
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Our entertainment world has arguably lost the meaning of the idea of obscenity. It is also no coincidence that, historically, some of the greatest attacks upon the idea of obscenity have been made by the press. Now we have the internet and, with it, does is the idea of obscenity really meaningful anymore? If one wants to see something, anything at all, the odds are greatly in one's favor that there is a video of precisely what you want somewhere online, most likely for free.<br />
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Weaver also commented upon this:<br />
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“Our age provides many examples of the ravages of immediacy, the clearest of which is the failure of the modern mind to recognize obscenity ... The word is employed here in its original sense to describe that which should be enacted off-stage because it is unfit for public exhibition. Such actions, it must be emphasized, may have no relation to gross animal functions; they include intense suffering and humiliation, which the Greeks, with habitual perspicacity and humanity, banned from their theater. The Elizabethans, on the other hand, with their robust allusions to the animal conditions of man’s existence, were none the less not obscene. It is all in the way one touches this subject. This failure of the concept of obscenity has been concurrent with the rise of the institution of publicity which, ever seeking to widen its field in accordance with the canon of progress, makes a virtue of desecration.” (pgs. 27-28.)<br />
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Some of us of a more conservative turn of mind still believe in the sacred. Consequently, we also believe that desecration is possible even in our own Postmodern age.<br />
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If you work in journalism and if you have any self-respect, then there are stories that you will not tell. There are photos that you will not show. Even if popular demand clamors for them, your sense of honor in your profession will keep you from acting like a cad. We do not have to be slaves to our passions and impulses. We do not have to seek to be merely entertained. Entertainment was, after all, in the days of Rome, considered a palliative and a distraction for the weak-minded. To allow yourself to be easily entertained was to allow yourself to be fooled and cheated.<br />
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As a journalist, if you have any self-respect or any sense for goodness, you will not focus upon what the tabloid rags focus upon.<br />
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<b>Alright, but what shall we do?</b><br />
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For one bit of help in answering this question, let's turn to C.S. Lewis. In an essay entitled “After Priggery - What?” in 1945, Lewis turned his attention to Yellow Journalism. He introduced the topic by positing a writer of lurid sensationalist news:<br />
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“Suppose a man tells me that he has recently been lunching with a gentleman whom we will call Cleon. My informant is an honest man and a man of good will. Cleon is a wicked journalist, a man who disseminates for money falsehoods calculated to produce envy, hatred, suspicion and confusion ... My friend believes Cleon to be as false as hell; but he meets him on perfectly friendly terms over a lunch table. In a priggish or self-righteous society Cleon would occupy the same social status as a prostitute. His social contacts would extend only to clients, fellow-professionals, moral welfare-workers, and the police. Indeed, in a society which was rational as well as priggish (if such a combination could occur) his status would be a good deal lower than hers. The intellectual virginity which he has sold is a dearer treasure than her physical virginity ... <b>Yet ... very few of us refrain from reading what he writes.</b>” [emphasis added]<br />
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If there is any good to come out of the almost hysterical obsession over Miley Cyrus in the last couple days, it is that some Americans were apparently finally shocked by something. This can be a good and healthy thing. It may not have been anything really new or surprising. It may have not been worth a single news story. But it did reveal to many, who had not thought much about it before, a little hint of the darkness that is a very real part of our pop celebrity culture. But, nevertheless, this good to come out of it all does not excuse the shamelessness with which members of the news media covered the story. Lewis continued:<br />
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“It is not our Christian love for the villain that has conquered our hatred of the villainy. We do not even pretend to love the villain; I have never in my life heard anyone speak well of him. As for the villainy, if we do not love it, we take it as a thing of course with a tolerant laugh or a shrug. We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked - a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or the child. In a word, we have not risen above priggery; we have sunk below it.”<br />
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If this is the type of thing that <i>The Huffington Post</i> does. If this is the type of story that <i>CNN</i> or <i>Fox News</i> can consider what is essentially a cover story, then they have shown us that they do not care whether what they are selling is sleaze. It is time some of us started ignoring them. After multiple displays of this sort of thing, I believe it is time we gave up watching and reading <i>CNN</i> and <i>Fox News</i> altogether. I have now lost all respect for <i>The Huffington Post</i>. It seems like such a little thing, but one has to draw a line somewhere. There is, as far as I can tell, no longer any good reason to ever patronize MTV.<br />
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But don’t we need to know what the news is? Don’t we need to read what is going on in our own culture? C.S. Lewis also answers this question:<br />
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“Again and again I find people with Cleon’s dirty sheets in their hands. They admit that he is a rogue but ‘one must keep up with the times, must know what is being said.’ That is one of the ways Cleon puts is across us. It is a fallacy. If we must find out what bad men are writing, and must therefore buy their papers, and therefore enable their papers to exist, who does not see that this supposed necessity of observing the evil is just what maintains the evil? It may in general be dangerous to ignore an evil; but not if the evil is one that perishes by being ignored.”<br />
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<i>CNN</i> and <i>Fox News</i> would not get away with the sort of irrelevance, inanity and utter dreck of their news reporting if they did not have very large viewerships. They exist because we watch them. But there is also an indication (hinted at if you watch the critiques now being given by the likes of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert) that the younger generations are getting tired of the modern news media. They are rendering themselves irrelevant by reporting on irrelevance - and reporting on it stupidly. Historically, different consumer movements have slowly changed what is produced for the consumer. I think it is high time that we saw a consumer movement against much of modern day news reporting.<br />
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Internet and social media have elevated the status of the raunchy tabloid. It is time for a larger and greater number of us to grow increasingly discriminating in our journalistic tastes. If a news website like <i>CNN</i> thinks a striptease is a top news story on the same day that our country is considering risking a war in the Middle East, then <i>CNN</i> is not for us. If a news website like <i>Fox News</i> tries to take advantage of and exploit the lack of wisdom of a 20-year-old in order to take cheap shots against liberalism or feminism, then <i>Fox News</i> is not for us.<br />
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If I cannot read political column about Syria on <i>The Huffington Post </i>without opening up a page filled with photographs of undressed women and hyperlinks to utter garbage, then I am no longer interested in reading <i>The Huffington Post</i>. The good writers that it possesses ought to, after taking one look at the webpages upon which their columns are placed, refuse to write for them any longer.<br />
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This does not eliminate all our options. We can consciously patronize those news sources that, if not perfect, at least demonstrate some level of decency and respectability. The more liberal <i>New York Times</i> and more conservative <i>Wall Street Journal </i>are two examples of older more traditional newspapers that did not cover the MTV awards as obsessively as other news outlets and websites did. They should be rewarded with our readership for such focus and self-control.<br />
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It is a very little thing, being discriminating with what news sources one allows oneself to consume, but it is something very worthwhile. It is a small effort to refrain from clicking on Entertainment News links that have already proved themselves to be sleazy, but it is still one little action that could, with time, combine with thousands of other similar and like-minded little actions.<br />
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Mindless news and entertainment ought to be frowned upon and avoided. Irrelevant news stories, offered for no other reason than for commercial interest and appeal to fantasy, takes a certain amount of nihilism to consume.<br />
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“We do not in the final reckoning desire uninterpreted data;” wrote Richard Weaver, “it is precisely the interpretation which holds our interest. But the great fault is that data, as it passes through the machine, takes its significance from a sickly metaphysical dream. The ultimate source of evaluation ceases to be the dream of beauty and truth and becomes that of psychopathia, of fragmentation, of disharmony and nonbeing.” Yes, our culture is sick. And our news outlets, whether on television or on the internet, actually encourage the sickness. “The operators of the [the news machine] by their very selection of matter make horrifying assumptions about reality. For its audience that overarching dome becomes a sort of miasmic cloud, a breeder of strife and degradation and of the subhuman. What person taking the affirmative view of life can deny that the world served up daily by press, movie, and radio is a world of evil and negation?” (pg. 104.)<br />
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Civilization and social order rest upon our comprehension of, and our ability to act upon, particular truths, virtues and ideals. There are greedy men who ignore all this because it is easy to exploit the masses. There are news reporters who grovel before any celebrity offering them yet another objectifying story of sex or titillation. This is morally abhorrent and they ought to be ashamed.<br />
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If Miley Cyrus ups the ante in the future, one of her best reasons for doing so will be because the news media hysteria and attention that she has now discovered she can so easily cause. How utterly dull and boring and uninteresting such a downward cycle really is. It’s already been done before. Why repeat it? Why try to make it even more obscene or more objectionable? Because sensual gratification appeals to that which is worst in human nature. Because excess of passion and appetite is profitable to the exploiter. And that which is worst in human nature is very powerful.<br />
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Marilynne Robinson writes:<br />
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“There are excitements that come with abandoning the constraints of moderation and reasonableness. Those whose work it is to sustain the endless palaver of radio and television increasingly stimulate these excitements. No great wonder if they are bored, of if they suspect their audiences might be. But the effect of this marketing of rancor has unquestionably been to turn debate or controversy increasingly into a form of tribal warfare, harming the national community and risking always greater harm. I think it is reasonable to wonder whether democracy can survive in this atmosphere.”<br />
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<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356805/american-satyricon-victor-davis-hanson">Classical scholars will tell you</a> that democracy and self-government has been able to survive in such an atmosphere in other historical ages for good amounts of time. But, at some point, it also ceases to be democracy and self-government. And, eventually, if left unchecked and unmoderated, it eventually ceases to be. We can just mindlessly go along with it. Or we can make the inherently moral decision that takes into account those things that truly matter.<br />
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Tomorrow, the United States may conduct (what has been traditionally considered) an act of war against Syria. Let us carefully consider the importance of what this may cause. Let us listen to those who are most worth listening to. And let us pray that the members of our government are not spending their time consuming the major news networks, online or on television, that exist in our country.<br />
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<i>“Oh, do not call them vultures, for vultures love dead meat<br />And rarely don disguises or lurk across the street.<br />Not so your tabloid journalist who craves his victims fresh,<br />To feed the willing multitudes who lust for living flesh.<br /><br />Oh, do not call them jackals, such epithets are crude,<br />A journo slays for shillings, a jackal hunts for food.<br />No more are they hyenas; hyenas do not laugh<br />While nosing through their vomit for one last paragraph.<br /><br />Oh, do not call them leeches, they’ve heard all that before,<br />And leeches have their uses - they gorge upon a war;<br />They worship trains derailing, they feast on plague or flood:<br />Yet were we to ignore them, they’d fade for lack of blood!”</i><b><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Half-Full-Felix-Dennis/dp/1401359531">- Felix Dennis, 2002</a></b><br />
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J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6864866939595676637.post-47635186800983116982013-08-19T10:32:00.001-07:002014-02-25T19:11:49.942-08:00On Being Young and Conservative in the Twenty-First Century<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Over the last decade, the primary sensation of being a young conservative can only be described as a sinking feeling combined with a profound sense of loss.<br /><br />The current conservative leadership has failed utterly. It is failing now. And, they are currently demonstrating a large amount of very compelling evidence that they will fail even more miserably in the future. And by “they” I mean “we.” Those of us younger conservatives still count ourselves as committed members to this grand tradition of political philosophy and culture.<br /><br />The failure here is a failure to communicate.<br /><br />It is a failure to articulate clearly. (This often necessarily follows the failure to think clearly.)<br /><br />It is a failure to remember old-fashioned things like civility, humility, wit and well-roundedness. <br /><br />It is a failure in all three forms of rhetoric:<i> logos</i>, <i>pathos</i> and <i>ethos</i>.<br /><br />It is a failure to preserve what we hold dear.<br /><br />It is a failure to represent a point of view that has a richness of depth, history and tradition.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />It is a failure of continuity with the past.<br /><br />It is a failure to act, to compromise, to be effective or to accomplish even minimal and rudimentary goals.<br /><br />And, above all, it is a failure to persuade.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Not only is the contemporary leadership failing to persuade in the political, economic, cultural and religious spheres, it is failing to persuade even those in its own camp.<br /><br />It is not even persuading the now grown children of those who were the strong conservatives of former decades.<br /><br />Progressives, liberals, postmoderns, “postconservatives,” independents .... all are dominating the public square. Conservative viewpoints are, purportedly, being voiced on the airwaves of Fox News and talk radio. But, if you have any background in conservative thought, you will not find Fox News to be conservative.<br /><br />Even the American church, long one of the last citadels of conservative thinking, has been overrun by the theological innovations and progressivism of the likes of Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthony Thiselton and Stanley Grenz. It does not matter, for purposes of responsibility, that church pastors and teachers do not even know who these thinkers are. They are still to blame because they parrot the ideas of Grenz <i>et. al.</i>, ceaselessly and uncritically. Only the occasional Brian McLaren knows from where his ideas derive. At least he is honest enough not to pretend to be traditional or conservative.<br /><br />The desire to educate oneself - to read theology, philosophy, sociology or psychology - while also attending a modern American church is depressing.<br /><br />There is nothing quite like the experience of reading how Carl Jung’s rejection of Christianity naturally led to his ideas about human ego and personality, and then to hear the pastor of a Christian church teach Jung’s conclusions without attributing them to their source (let alone without giving any indication of any understanding of from where they derive).<br /><br />There is nothing quite as discouraging as reading the arguments of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers against the Judeo-Christian foundations of thought, and then to go listen to the ideas of Maslow and Rogers preached from a church pulpit.<br /><br /><b>The modern American church is powerfully attracted to cultural fads and many have swallowed the conceit that the church is bound to shift and change along with the culture.</b><br /><br />Because the postmodernism and deconstructionism of Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Peter L. Berger and Jacques Derrida are still in fashion in society, a dumbed-down populist version of the same is being taught in the modern American church. If the ideas of Norman Vincent Peale and Charles A. Reich are reduced and overly-simplified derivatives of Rogers and Maslow, then the teachings of Phil McGraw, Laura Schlessinger and Oprah Winfrey are reduced and overly-simplified derivatives of Peale and Reich. (This has been demonstrated by what they actually teach, irrespective of their protestations otherwise.)<br /><br />Popular American evangelical, “emergent” or “missional” teaching don’t just repeat the ideas of Rogers or Maslow.<br /><br />Instead it copies the copycats. That’s right. In other words, much of the teachings of the American church are reduced and simplified derivatives of McGraw, Schlessinger or Winfrey. There is now far too much church teaching that copies the derivatives of Peale and Reich who are themselves derivatives of Rogers and Maslow. American church teaching can’t even get its postmodern thought from Lyotard or Foucault. Instead, it borrows it from Hollywood or other forms of popular culture, after all traces of actual thought have already been put through a rigorous dumbing down process.<br /><br />It does this to be popular and to draw a crowd and to, when it comes down to it, <b>act as if the church were a product that needed to kowtow to the economic laws of supply and demand. </b><br /><br />Thus the kitschy marketing gimmicks, the buzzwords and slogans and nonsense, that, when you actually pay close attention to what is really being said - turns out to be mere slogans or aphorisms that are so broad they could mean almost anything.<br /><br />Thus all the trendy clichés and buzz-words in Christian sub-culture - metanarrative, intentional, missional, gospel-centered, relevant, authentic, journey, conversation, identity, construction, self-talk, “speaking into,” “prophetic word,” relational, hipster, “spiritual formation,” etc., etc.<br /><br />Postmodernism came along and announced (reasserting the propositions of Mediaeval nominalist philosophy) that language, along with the traditional definitions of English words, had lost its meaning. The Deconstructionists claimed that traditional rationalist thinking was <i>passé</i>, that traditional Western thinking was corrupted by hidden metanarratives, ideologies of power and social constructs, and that human identity was to be constructed out of whole cloth by “finding” the satisfaction of supposed psychological needs “in” things of your own choosing. All this nonsense was explained in trendy and fashionable terms. Much of the modern American church took one look at it, rolled over on its belly <b>and happily adopted the language of a philosophy designed to cut down Christianity at the roots.</b><br /><br />None of the sort of thing, of course, that would brighten one’s day.<br /><br />When I point out how conservatism has been losing, I do not mean to complain about our numbers in the sense that I expect traditional conservativism to be the majority point of view.<br /><br />I am not referring to the mere fact that we are currently a minority. Conservatism has survived minority status before. Neither I am referring to the fact that we are not trendy or currently in fashion. Being fashionable has never been a worry of the conservative, and despite all the hyped-up talk of getting “with it” with the younger generations or appealing to minority demographics, of learning how to be “up to date” with the latest technology and social networking campaign strategies, we are going to have to admit that making these changes is not going to “fix” anything not already blatantly obvious or easy.<br /><br />Listening to opponents labeling us as “behind the times” or “reactionary” or “antiquated” is as anciently old hat as political philosophy itself. Even to be worried about such accusations is to forget how to <i>be</i> a conservative in the first place.<br /><br />But, then again, that’s it. <b>We have forgotten how to be conservative.</b> The consequences of this are the well-documented widespread desertions from our ranks. But, even worse, the consequences are the loss of the conservative point of view from the public square.<br /><br />We have allowed the Sean Hannitys and Ann Coulters and Glenn Becks, the Mitt Romneys and Rick Santorums and even the Rand Pauls, to make up their own definitions of what being conservative means. This is our degradation. This is our criminal abandonment of our outposts in the dark of the night. This is our incompetence and ignorance and naivety and defeat and break with our time-tested traditions.<br /><br />This is our severing ourselves from history, from reason, from culture, from intellectual foundation, from the arts and humanities, from basic human relationships and from life.<br /><br />To be young and conservative has become, for far too many bright and active and passionate people, to be disenchanted and disillusioned.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />I know too many other young conservatives (or former conservatives) who are struggling with embitterment, with apathy and with boredom.<br /><br />The most powerful inclination can easily turn into the desire to disassociate ourselves from conservatism itself. We turn more independent and progressive. We join the ranks of those who have simply given up on our ancestors. We no longer care enough to study or to learn what being conservative really meant before it was co-opted and used as the pretext for the ranting and invectives of populist self-serving demagogues.<br /><br />How do we escape this banalization and ultimate despair?<br /><br />How do we avoid ignoring the problem in the hope that it just goes away?<br /><br />During the first decade of the twenty-first century, to be young and conservative has meant sinking into an ever deepening morass of cynicism. It is so easy to be cynical. It is too easy to sneer and dismiss words that seem as if they are now empty and have lost all meaning, and then to attempt to create your own language that only further isolates you from the rest of the world. It is also too easy to give up the hard and complex work that thinking through the present situation requires. It is too easy to quit trying and to just unquestioningly accept the uncomplicated role of a mere propagator and loyal supporter of one’s own ideologically enclosed camp.<br /><br />Or, why not just join the opposition? - it is, after all, more open, more tolerant, more inclusive, more willing to help the lost and the poor and the needy. That is what Christ would have done ... isn’t it?<br /><br />Or, perhaps even more easily, why not allow your cynicism to encompass the entire political spectrum? Just float along with the times. Liberal and conservative are boxes too simplistic to fit into anymore anyway. Why do we need to be labeled at all? Why follow our parents and grandparents' biased stereotypes? Why not just be independent, individual, authentically you? Why not insist on being merely your own unique, nonconforming and beautifully individual snowflake? Why not?<br /><br />Because these dumb questions have been asked before.<br /><br />Because choosing your own individualhood over continuity with the past, both bad and good, is the rejection of community.<br /><br />Because refusing all labels and generalizations is to ultimately conform to the transitory fashion of the time.<br /><br />Because it is to merely accept the proposition that form and limit to thought is the negation of self (an oxymoron if there ever was one).<br /><br />Because doing so is to follow an old and worn and much trampled path. It is, quite frankly, a dull and unimaginative option.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span>Because, and it is time we understood these distinctions again, “immanentizing the eschaton,” as Eric Voegelin would say, is impossible and attempting it causes more harm than good. Because conservativism, as H. Stuart Hughes would say, is the negation of any ideology. Because one acts differently if one is trying to attain perfection, than if one is trying to work within the confines of reality.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />You do not, in fact, get to do your own thing. “Doing your own thing” is the populist path pursued by Cleon in the time of Pericles. It is the position insisted upon by Callicles in spite of the challenging questions of Socrates. It is the ability promised by Gaius Marius as he began the destruction of the Roman Republic. Insisting on your own personal independence is the much romanticized path articulated in all its pleasure-seeking detail by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and then followed happily by Thomas Paine, by the Jacobins and by Robespierre, by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by Henry David Thoreau, by Marx and by Engels, by John Stuart Mill, by William Jennings Bryan, by the Progressives and the by Positivists, and by the Existentialists and the Deconstructionists. And each merry path, historically, ends in darkness.<br /><br />Eschewing labels is a philosophical trope unto itself, promulgated by post-modern philosophers precisely like Michel Foucault or by Christian religious “emerging” teachers like Brian McLaren.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Just sit down and read Plato’s <i>Gorgias</i>.<br /><br />Seeking to be free from traditional social constraints is not just something you can do without associating yourself with a particular line of thought. Life is too complex to avoid schools of thinking.<br /><br />There are philosophically backed positions for any action that you may choose to take. <b>Our actions, after all, demonstrate how we really think.</b> Even if we do not think through the logical consequences of the ideas that our actions demonstrate that we really believe, the logical consequences still exist regardless. There is a intellectual history to thought.<br /><br /><b>There are ideas that you will prove that you believe by how you act, even if you are ignorant of where these ideas originated from or if you are uneducated as to how these ideas have been explained and why and to what purpose.</b><br /><br />By how you act and by how you speak (or by how you don't act or how you don't speak), you support one philosophy against other ways of thinking, even if you do not even know that the philosophy exists.<br /><br />I also am, however, one of these uneducated unfortunates.<br /><br />Intellectual history is not a subject often taught in schools or universities. It was not taught to me. It was not taught to my parents. It wasn’t really taught to my grandparents. If you (a) are alive right now, and (b) have received a modern education, then the chances are really really good that you were cheated. We’re all in the same boat.<br /><br />Understanding that the ideas that I speak, support and advocate have histories is not an understanding I have been conditioned or trained to possess. I wasn’t taught habits of precision in my speech, my writing or my thinking. The Classical Educational model, prevalent in schools from before the Medieval Ages to the Nineteenth Century, was designed to create well-rounded critical thinkers. The progressivized Twentieth Century version of “education” was designed to teach useful subjects and values. The Twenty-First Century version of “education” is merely a 2.0 of the progressive version, the same version, now with increased access to computers and internet and phone applications.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We need to realize the unique problems with which we have to deal in our own age. In his follow-up book, <i>Brave New World Revisited</i>, Aldous Huxley explained: </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If Orwell's version of totalitarian oppression was the fight of the 20th Century, then Huxley's soft form of (even democratic) despotism, will be the fight of the 21st Century.<br /><br /><i>“For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment -- from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation ... Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but some-where else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.”</i><br /><br />We can do better.<br /><br />There is much work to be done, but first things first.<br /><br /><b>Here is, therefore, putting all participants in our current cultural, political and religious landscape ON NOTICE:</b><br /><br />There are still conservative thinkers who are not so easily disillusioned with our old political philosophy. This is because our thinking is not based upon mere passing historical fashions like the “Tea Party” or the “Religious Right.” What we know of conservatism is not only the transitory movements our own little age or lifetimes. Instead, our thinking is shaped by the intellectual work that was carefully laid before us by the likes of <b>William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Robert Nisbet, Richard M. Weaver, Gerhart Niemeyer, James Burnham, Eric Voegelin, Whittaker Chambers, Leo Strauss, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer Moore, George Santayana, W.H. Mallock, W.E.H. Lecky, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Henry Newman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge</b> and others. This is the tradition we adhere to.<br /><br />This is a foundation that still exists today even if the talking heads currently making large amounts of noise on the television are unaware of it.<br /><br />Therefore, today we read and seek out respectable, formidable and persuasive thinkers such as Robert P. George, Victor Davis Hanson, Russell Jacoby, Marilynne Robinson, Roger Scruton and Wendell Berry. In our current technological age, we are also interested in making a few adjustments and realignments within the Conservative coalition. This ought to include a line of thinking that questions how technology shapes who we are and how we live: begun by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and now Nicholas Carr, among others.<br /><br />We greatly value tradition. We understand that prudence and moderation are virtues. We acknowledge Edmund Burke’s warnings, but also his elucidations upon how conservative thought always has to make new adjustments in every historical age.<br /><br />We exist. We are young. And we are going to start participating in the public square. <b>There are some readjustments that will have to be made.</b><br /><br />I, for one, find the level of discourse conducted over at Fox News equally as appalling as that conducted over at CNN. I cannot stomach listening to the thoughtlessness of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and others like them. I am embarrassed that anyone at all ever listens to Glenn Beck.<br /><br />There is some serious housecleaning that needs to be done.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The times <i>do</i> change. The more Huxley that I read, the more prophetic I find him. We are allowing ourselves to be too distracted and contented. We no longer care about politics and culture, let alone do we care about being active in these spheres. We are not doing much of anything to preserve the basis of our own civilization. Huxley explained:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>“That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. ‘Free as a bird,’ we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone -- or at least by bread and circuses alone. ‘In the end,’ says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's parable, ‘in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, “make us your slaves, but feed us.”’ And when Alyosha Karamazov asks his brother, the teller of the story, if the Grand Inquisitor is speaking ironically, Ivan answers, ‘Not a bit of it! He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that they have vanquished freedom and done so to make men happy.’ Yes, to make men happy; ‘for nothing,’ the Inquisitor insists, ‘has ever been more insupportable for a man or a human society than freedom.’ Nothing, except the absence of freedom; for when things go badly, and the rations are reduced, the grounded dodos will clamor again for their wings -- only to renounce them, yet once more, when times grow better and the dodo-farmers become more lenient and generous ...<br /><br />“The young people who now think so poorly of democracy may grow up to become fighters for freedom. The cry of ‘Give me television and hamburgers, but don't bother me with the responsibilities of liberty,’ may give place, under altered circumstances, to the cry of ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ ... The Grand Inquisitor reproaches Christ with having called upon men to be free and tells Him that ‘we have corrected Thy work and founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority.’ But miracle, mystery and authority are not enough to guarantee the indefinite survival of a dictatorship. In my fable of Brave New World, the dictators had added science to the list and thus were able to enforce their authority by manipulating the bodies of embryos, the reflexes of infants and the minds of children and adults. And, instead of merely talking about miracles and hinting symbolically at mysteries, they were able, by means of drugs, to give their subjects the direct experience of mysteries and miracles -- to transform mere faith into ecstatic knowledge. The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The circuses of the Twenty-First century are now all the rage. They are distracting and occupying us without any relief. Conservatives are going to have to choose to distinguish the moderation and prudence that is necessary for the order of their own souls.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And, finally, and most important of all, there is an underlying conviction. Social civilized order is a gift with profound moral dimensions. The choices that we make on where we invest and spend our time, on how we choose to think, on what we emphasize, compromise or give away are not limited to some little secular material box that the Gnostic heresy would have us limit them too. In epistemology, there is a moderate school of realism that (a) acknowledges the existence of absolute truths, and (b) also acknowledges the fact that they only inhere in the very specific particulars of the reality in which we actually live.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Mere abstract theorizing and ideological reductionism are of no use to us.<br /><br />Apathy and cynicism are not going to change anyone’s soul for the better.<br /><br />There are adjustments on issues we can make but there are also some hills worth dying on.<br /><br />There is so much of very great value in our culture. If even a tiny fraction of what the greatest philosophers and theologians have said about the existence of the eternal is true, then there are really moments in life and culture where we can find that intersection between “time and the timeless.” There are particulars that exist in the reality in which we live that can make us into better persons.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There are some problems that, without striving for any perfect Gnostic dream world, we can address differently from the past. We will have to. There are intellectual and social and solid foundations upon which we can rest our positions. When we rest a reform - no matter what the social problem happens to be - upon the right traditional grounding, it will be unassailable to ill-informed critique.<br /><br />There are moral dimensions to our life together that I have no interest in trivializing into simplistic ideological slogans but neither do I have any interest in denying their existence. You shouldn’t either. It is by acknowledging these further dimensions to life that we can take the broader and more moderate view of political and cultural questions. It is by challenging ourselves to think through all the implications of how we choose to act or not to act that we can strive for discernment, prudence, and reasoned good judgment. It is by seeking out the good that we have no experience of that we can shape and change ourselves for the better.<br /><br />These are all considerations that I have too long neglected to my own detriment. My prayer and my desire is that I - that <i>we</i> - would neglect them no longer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The foundations have not yet been destroyed. They are still there to be the ground for our action.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Tempus fugit. Ab honesto virum bonum nihil deterret.</i></span><br />
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J.A.A. Purveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09238869737913864073noreply@blogger.com0