While We’re At It

♦ Here’s another insight for right-wing progressives to consider:

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

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♦ I predicted the scenario: a European court would nullify the results of an election. I had imagined that the European Court of Human Rights would rule the victory of a populist candidate a violation of human rights. By this way of thinking, “European values” are a human right, which means an election that puts into power someone European elites deem a threat to “European values” is by definition a violation of human rights. Citizens have a right to progressive governance, and that right must be defended!

The Romanian constitutional court took a different approach to achieve the same outcome. Following the first round of the presidential election that propelled outsider candidate Călin Georgescu into a commanding lead, the court fixed upon claims that Russia had used social media accounts to influence the election. On that basis, the court annulled the results.

Writing in Compact, Thomas Fazi observes, “It’s the first time a European court has overturned the result of an election, signaling a troubling escalation in the EU-NATO establishment’s increasingly open war on democracy.” Underlining Fazi’s observation: The U. S. State Department issued a memorandum that implicitly endorsed the judicial coup. All hands on deck to defend “our democracy”!

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♦ The Holy Scriptures are selling. The Wall Street Journal reports a year-over-year 22 percent increase in Bible sales. I’m not surprised. Last fall, an NBC News poll reported that two-thirds of voters say the country is on the wrong track. It’s an understandable judgment. Drug addiction, homelessness, sky-high home prices, inflation, a weakening culture of marriage, declines in fertility, polarized politics, untrustworthy institutions—nobody can reasonably say that these dysfunctions arise in a world run by evangelical pastors and Catholic bishops. To the contrary, it’s the leadership of our secular progressive establishment that has curdled society—which puts the Bible in a favorable light. The Bible is not implicated in the impairments of the post-Christian West, and those disgruntled by the status quo are eyeing the Word of God. What one finds in its pages is quite different from progressive pieties, and as dissatisfaction with the status quo grows, that difference is an increasingly attractive quality.

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♦ I don’t regard Elton John as a reliable source of wisdom. But he’s not always wrong. And when it comes to the legalization of marijuana, he’s entirely right. Speaking to a Time magazine journalist, the venerable rock star said, “I maintain that it’s addictive. And when you’re stoned—and I’ve been stoned—you don’t think normally.” Which led John to conclude, “Legalizing marijuana in America and Canada is one of the greatest mistakes of all time.”

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♦ In early December, Pope Francis attended the inauguration of a nativity scene in the Vatican, created by Palestinian artists. The baby Jesus lay on a keffiyeh, the scarf that Palestinians have adopted as a national symbol. The display announces an unfortunate anti-Semitic trope: Jesus was NOT Jewish.

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♦ Fr. Robert Imbelli charts the right course: “The Church needs to be properly ‘woke,’ to awaken from the utopian dreams we see all around us in the culture. It’s not a comfortable thing to live in a fallen world. But a false comfort will only make things worse” (“The Church Somnolent,” The Catholic Thing).

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♦ Pascal: “Justice without might is impotent. Might without justice is tyrannical.” We should keep these truths in mind when judging political actors. Unprincipled pursuit of power and power attained for nefarious purposes are to be condemned. But we should also censure those who champion principle in the public square while being either inept at attaining power or unwilling to enter the fray with effective means.

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♦ British journalist Ruby Warrington is the author of Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of Unsung Sisterhood. In his recent book, The Care Dilemma, David Goodhart quotes her estimation that half of female academics in Great Britain are childless. I doubt the situation is much different in the United States. Indeed, among professors under fifty, male and female, I suspect that the rate of infertility is well north of 50 percent and that the share with more than one child is statistically negligible. As has been so often the case in recent decades, higher education incubates some of our worst social diseases.

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♦ I recommend Walter Russell Mead’s two-part essay on Donald Trump’s role in American political history, “Rebel Yell” (Tablet). Mead highlights the enduring role of Jacksonian populism, which waxes when out-of-touch elites become imperious and censorious. The post–Civil War South was a hotbed of populist political resentment, which became powerful enough to put an end to Reconstruction, much to the dismay of Northern elites. Mead regards the MAGA base as a twenty-first-century expansion of Southern populism into a remarkably diverse cohort, which is united in its hostility toward elites and the institutions they dominate. As he notes, one reason Republican elites were blindsided by Trump is that “white Southern political history after the Civil War is not a subject many people bother with anymore.” All attention falls on the “subaltern.” Dissertations are written on black homosexual culture in New Orleans and other recherché topics. Mead goes on to make an important observation: “But history does not lose its influence because people don’t study it.” America is always simmering with populism, which occasionally comes to a boil. University committees and peer-reviewed journals can enforce ignorance, but they can’t cancel reality.

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♦ In his 1939 sermon, “Learning in Wartime,” C. S. Lewis outlines the essential elements of education:

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his age.

Today’s politicized curricula leave students and academics imprisoned in the present and ill equipped to make sober and informed judgments about contemporary politics.

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♦ In preparation for an excellent Liberty Fund seminar on fusionism past and present, I was reading George H. Nash’s history of postwar conservatism, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in American Since 1945. Nash’s account of the often-intense debates in the late 1950s and early 1960s illuminates the degree to which “postliberalism” and its critiques of liberalism have precedent. Here’s Brent Bozell in a 1962 National Review article (“Freedom or Virtue?”): “The story of how the free society has come to take priority over the good society is the story of the decline of the West.” And here’s Willmoore Kendall rejecting John Stuart Mill’s conceit that we should rely on a marketplace of ideas:

In order to practice tolerance on behalf of the pursuit of truth, you have first to value and believe in not merely the pursuit of truth but truth itself, with all its accumulated riches to date. The all-questions-are-open-questions society cannot do that: it cannot, therefore, practice tolerance towards those who disagree with it.

Paradoxically, the open society is open only to those who endorse the open society. The inclusive university accepts only those committed to inclusion. The patrons of diversity celebrate only those who champion diversity.

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♦ Canada vindicates Kendall’s claims about the open society’s trajectory toward intolerance. The town of Emo, Ontario was brought before that province’s Human Rights Tribunal. Its crime? Failing to honor Pride Month. The commissars on the tribunal ordered the rural township to pay $15,000 in damages to a local LGBTQ+ advocacy group and required town officials to undergo diversity and inclusion “training.” Welcome to the Rainbow Reich.

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♦ Darrel Darby of Charleston, South Carolina wishes to form a ROFTers group. If you want to meet with smart, like-minded people who are not averse to arguing about theology, culture, and the meaning of life, get in touch with him: hddarby@pm.me.

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♦ At 6 p.m. on February 13, Patrick Deneen will deliver the first annual Neuhaus Lecture at New College of Florida in Sarasota. His title: “We’re All Postliberals Now.” For details, go to firstthings.com/florida. We’re grateful to the college for providing the venue. The institution’s support is a bright spot in the otherwise blighted landscape of higher education. I hope to see you at the lecture.

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♦ I’m also pleased to announce that Carl Trueman will deliver our annual Washington, D.C., lecture at 6 p.m. on March 11: “The Hour for a New Humanism.” For more information, visit firstthings.com/dc.

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♦ December is half done as I write. Our year-end campaign is in full swing, and many readers have stepped up with generous donations. Next month, I’ll report the results. In the meantime, please accept my thanks. It is a blessing to run a publication that wins your support.