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The Humane and The Inhumane

May 18, 2013 By 1 Comment

Brave New World humane inhumaneby Robert M. Woods

Over the years I’ve seen countless book lists and there are two books on “must read lists” that speak to the modern world insightfully, but in differing manners. As dystopian works, people have tended to see them both as “prophetic” and yet, of the two, most think that the one literary vision was closer to reality than the other.

The two works are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Just prior to the year 1984 Orwell’s book became a best seller even though it was originally published in 1949. However, of the two works the case could be made that Huxley’s vision was closer to getting it right and it has remained increasingly contemporary even though it was originally published in 1932. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aldous Huxley, Books, George Orwell, Robert M. Woods, Truth Tagged With: May 18, 2013

The Political Thought of Gouverneur Morris

May 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Gouverneur Morris

Gouverneur Morris

by Forrest McDonald

As is well known, Gouverneur Morris, the New York aristocrat who represented Pennsylvania in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, wrote the Constitution of the United States. When the Convention completed its substantive deliberations on September 10, it turned its various resolutions over to a Committee of Style and Arrangement, consisting of Morris, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Rufus King, and William Samuel Johnson. The other members, aware of Morris’s considerable skills as a pensman. entrusted the drafting to him. Morris, in correspondence with Timothy Pickering many years later, asserted that the Constitution “was written by the fingers, which write this letter”—an assertion substantiated by Madison in a letter to Jared Sparks in 1831. [1] [Read more...]

Filed Under: American Founding, Constitution, Forrest McDonald, Political Philosophy May 18, 2013

Progressives & Conservatives: Is there Common Ground?

May 17, 2013 By 5 Comments
Gleaves Whitney common ground

Gleaves Whitney

by Gleaves Whitney

Common Ground between Whom?

A lot of people are skeptical about what the Hauenstein Center is trying to do. Seriously now: common ground between conservatives and progressives? Each camp has been telling me how much it can’t stand the other. In popular culture, conservatives regard progressives as arrogant, woolly-minded, and un-American; progressives see conservatives as stupid, mossbacked, and greedy. Does anyone seriously think that the Tea Party would make common cause with Occupy Wall Street, or MSNBC reconcile with FOX News?

The gulf between the two camps has been widening in the academy. This is unfortunate because academic rigor requires intellectual diversity. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Conservatism, Gleaves Whitney, Liberalism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Progressivism May 17, 2013

Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Harvey Mansfield

May 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Harvey Mansfield

Harvey Mansfield

by Lee Trepanier

In my last post, I wrote about Leo Strauss’ defense of liberal education as a possible antidote to the narrowness of specialization of knowledge and the moral aimlessness of positivist ideology. One way to teach liberal education is to have students read the great thinkers of one’s tradition. In his chapter on Harvey Mansfield in Teaching in an Age of Ideology, Travis D. Smith writes about how Mansfield breathes new life into old books, asks students to be courageous, and invites them to participate in the conversation about the true, the beautiful, and the good.

As the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield is not only a prolific scholar, sophisticated patriot, and one of the best known public intellectuals of conservatism but he is also an outstanding teacher who challenges his students’ preconceptions and prejudices where they will feel at unease but not displeased with the world. Raising more questions than resolving them in the classroom, Mansfield pitches his lectures slightly over the heads of everyone in class to engender puzzlement, confusion, and frustration in the hope that students realize that genuine education is neither glib performance nor academic condensation but to be shaken at the soul from the dogmatic laziness of our contemporary culture. The starting point of liberal education therefore is not one of self-satisfaction or skeptical smugness but a genuine wondering of the world that is prompted by puzzlement and bewilderment.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Education, Ideology, Lee Trepanier, Liberal Learning Tagged With: May 17, 2013

The Imaginative Conjurors

May 16, 2013 By 5 Comments
epic conjurers imaginative

Michael Bauman

by Michael Bauman

Not long after Bob Dylan’s conversion, I heard him give a radio interview.  For obvious reasons, I always considered him a tough challenge in such settings.  He can be moody, unpredictable, combative, and cryptic.  In this discussion, he was true to form.  That, and Dylan continually strummed his guitar in the background, muffling both the interviewer’s questions and his own sometimes mumbled answers.

It seemed to me that the interviewer was growing desperate.  Things were not unfolding smoothly.  So he tried to get on Dylan’s good side.  In reference to Dylan’s newly found Christianity, the interviewer said, “Beauty, truth, and goodness — isn’t that what it’s all about, Bob?” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Beauty, Michael Bauman, Politics, Theology May 16, 2013

Irving Babbitt & Richard Weaver: Conservative Sages

May 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

by George A. Panichas

Irving Babbitt weaver

Irving Babbitt

richard weaver babbitt

Richard Weaver

Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by Irving Babbitt, with a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn

Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, by Richard M. Weaver, with a foreword by Russell Kirk

Two modern American teachers and critics who can now be honored as Sages and, indeed, included among the Sacri Vates, are Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) and Richard Weaver (1910-1963). One who in any way studies two recently reissued books, Babbitt’s Character and Culture (originally titled Spanish Character and Other Essays) and Weaver’s Visions of Order, will need very little convincing as to the appropriateness of the sapiential ascription. To read these two books again, or even for the first time, is to make contact with men of vision who are quintessentially men of wisdom. Perhaps at no time of our history do we have more urgent need for wisdom than now. For the wisdom we gain here is both salvific and restorative; it enables us to climb the ladder of illumination. Babbitt likens this process to “the ascending path of insight and discrimination”; Weaver describes it as the need to “have something ascending up toward an ultimate source of good.” This moving upward requires strenuous effort, and its rewards are to be found in the higher experiential contexts of what is self-cleansing and self-disciplining. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Character, Conservatism, Culture, George A. Panichas, Irving Babbitt, Modern Age, Order, Richard Weaver May 16, 2013

Marcus Aurelius and Barack Obama

May 15, 2013 By 6 Comments
Louis A. Markos marcus aurelius barack obama

Louis A. Markos

by Louis A. Markos

After weathering such mad and depraved emperors as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, Rome was blessed by a succession of five good emperors who brought stability and prosperity to the empire from 96-180: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. The last of these emperors was not only a good general, efficient administrator, and just ruler; he marked the closest the ancient pagan world ever came to having a true Platonic philosopher-king.

In his Meditations, a series of Stoic reflections written in the mode of Seneca, Aurelius yearns for a one-world nation united in peace. He rejects extravagance and personal glory to serve Rome and to defend her from the barbarians who would tear her apart. Reflecting back on Aurelius’s reflections, the great Victorian utilitarian John Stuart Mill once wrote that it was a tragedy that Christianity did not become the official religion of Rome while the enlightened Aurelius (rather than the brutal Constantine) was on the throne. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Louis Markos, Politics Tagged With: May 15, 2013

Six Little-Known Musical Portraits of the Sea

May 15, 2013 By 1 Comment

Sea Nymphsby Stephen M. Klugewicz

The sea has forever stirred the imagination of painters, poets, bards, and composers. In music, Ralph Vaughan Williams gave us “A Sea Symphony,” Claude Debussy his “La Mer,” Wagner his “Flying Dutchman.” Rimsky-Korsakov also depicts the sea in the first and last movements of his famous “Scheherazade.” In addition to these well-known works, however, there are other, lesser-known musical masterpieces inspired by the ocean. Here are six you have probably never heard.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Beauty, Culture, Music, Steve Klugewicz May 15, 2013

Finding Heroism in Cinema & Television Science Fiction

May 14, 2013 By 6 Comments
heroism

James T. Kirk

by Bradley J. Birzer

Where are the Heroes?

Where in this modern and post-modern world do we find an embrace of heroism and the heroic virtues?

Certainly not in most literature published since the 1960s.  There exists much irony and tragedy, certainly—remnants, perhaps, of late Greece as well as late Rome.  But, in present-day serious literature, there exists almost no real heroism.  Even the good Germanic, Norse, and Celtic legends seem absent from the most recent of fiction.

At worst, a hero is something to be mocked, an old fashioned (and out of time) boy scout, a puritan do-gooder.  At best, we wink at each other, knowingly acknowledging that he is being “over the top” or campy or something else that fills us with a glib sense of irony. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Brad Birzer, Heroism Tagged With: , , , , May 14, 2013

Russell Kirk: An Integrated Man

May 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk

by Ian Boyd, C.S.B.

The most obvious and important thing that must be said about Russell Kirk concerns the harmony that existed between his public and his private life. He was an integrated man who lived what he wrote. There were no disappointing disjunctions between the private and the public self. On the contrary, the happy domestic life at Piety Hill was a sort of extension of his written work, a lived parable which illuminated everything he wrote about the primacy of private life over public life, about the family as the essential human community, and about the basic loyalties to the villages, neighborhoods, and regions in which human beings were most likely to find fulfillment and a measure of happiness. The philosophy that he outlined in his many books and essays was embodied in his everyday life, and his everyday life provided a running commentary on the deeper meaning of that philosophy. Those who were privileged to be his friends were people whose understanding of his thought was only deepened by their knowledge of a life which made that thought even more real for them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community, Conservatism, Culture, G.K. Chesterton, Ian Boyd, Intercollegiate Review, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk May 14, 2013

The Paradoxes of Individualism—False and Real

May 13, 2013 By 1 Comment
individualism

Bruce Frohnen

by Bruce Frohnen

A friend and colleague often forces me to read The Chronicle of Higher Education.  It is a dreary compendium of leftist ideology and smug conventional wisdom he enjoys using to depress me.  Nonetheless, I do occasionally read beyond the opening paragraphs to see what I would be thinking if only I were as “smart” as I should be.  I struck gold (well, pyrite at any event) in a recent issue.  The April 5 “Review” section of the Chronicle included an essay by one Mark S. Weiner titled “The Paradox of Individualism.”  The paradox?  That individualists (bad guys to begin with, of course) end up destroying true individualism by tearing down government.

If that sounds odd to you, congratulations.  But here is the argument:  were today’s individualists (by which Weiner means, of course, anyone opposed to the persistent expansion of government into every area of our lives) to succeed, the result would not be an increase in individual liberty.  Rather, the result of any substantial reining in of governmental power would be an increase in “clan” power, bringing intolerance, violence, and a general degradation of our way of life. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bruce Frohnen, Conservatism Tagged With: May 13, 2013

Philosopher of Love: David Schindler

May 13, 2013 By 2 Comments
David L. Schindler

David L. Schindler

by Jeremy Beer

For the orthodox Christian, is doing one’s public duty more or less reducible to voting for the most socially conservative Republican on the ballot—and then shutting up about whatever misgivings one might have? Surely not. Yet for many election cycles, this has been often implied by the self-appointed guardians of practicality and political realism. It is even increasingly heard from the pulpit.

The assumptions that lurk behind this idea are that when it comes to ordering public life, modern liberal democracy in its best sense has things basically right. America rightly understood is the highest exemplar of this kind of liberalism. And the Republican Party is our best reasonable hope for defending this liberalism’s political, economic, and cultural accomplishments from its enemies. To question these assumptions is to be naïve or—a favorite epithet—utopian. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, David L. Schindler, Jeremy Beer, The American Conservative, Theology May 13, 2013
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