I’m glad I re-subscribed to First Things. I can’t read it cover-to-cover, but it has some real gems.
University education delivers goods that are seen as commodities, as purchasable means to satisfy individual desires and solve collective problems. The knowledge it offers is a production, a techne that is a means to an end extrinsic to it. All academic disciplines in the late-modern research university have become servile arts, and the university an accidental agglomeration of advanced research competencies gathered in one facility for the sake of managerial and logistical convenience.
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The University has morphed into a polytechnicum with a functionalized, propaedeutic liberal arts appendix, a community college on steroids, with undergraduate training subdivided into functionalized pre-med, pre-law, pre-engineering training and the “salad bar” consumer curriculum in the humanities.
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[ John Henry Newman speaking of Francis Bacon:] ” I cannot deny [that Bacon] has abundantly achieved what he proposed. He is is simply a Method whereby bodily discomforts and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed from the greatest number.”
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The very success of the Baconian University carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if the current trend should come to its logical term – if indeed each of the advanced research competencies of the University could be located elsewhere, links directly to companies and state labs – then the University in any substantive sense will have disappeared.
Reinhart Hütter, Polytechnic Utiliversity, First Things, November 2013 (pay wall; hyperlinked definition added).
I have always believed that liberals should be the euthanasia movement’s natural enemies. The liberalism to which I committed myself in my youth was concerned with expanding the moral community by ending racism and protecting the weak and vulnerable people against exploitation and abuse. Today’s liberalism is increasingly concerned with advancing personal desires at the expense of social norms. It favors narrative and appeals to emotion more than principle.
Wesley J. Smith, Forced Exit (book review), First Things, November 2013 (pay wall).
“As more and more populations are added to the immense ‘global middle class,’ each people is commanded to divorce itself from its culpable past—one said to be defined by intolerance and oppression. At the same time, the monuments of their crimes, whether cathedrals or pyramids, are enlisted as elements of a ‘global patrimony.’”
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Thus “the only blameworthy human conduct for us is what used to be called ‘conversion’ . . . because no one preference is more legitimate than any other. Under a flashing neon sign proclaiming ‘human unity,’ contemporary Europeans would have humanity arrest all intellectual or spiritual movement in order to conduct a continual, interminable liturgy of self-adoration.”
Pierre Manent, Democracy Without Nations, quoted in First Things, November 2013 (pay wall).
American Betrayal, a new book by a conservative writer named Diana West, is, Ronald Radosh concludes a long and careful review, a “misconceived and misleading book.” She argues that the Roosevelt administration was (this is West quoted by Radosh) “penetrated, fooled, subverted, in effect hijacked, by Soviet agents” and engaged in a “sell-out to Stalin.” This explains, she claims, why the Allies did not march into Eastern Europe at the end of the war and many other decisions.
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Radosh argues that her “aggressive counter vision” to the old leftist narrative, in which witch-hunting McCarthyism was the real problem and the Soviet Union never sent spies, drew them approval, and understandably enough.
As did, I suspect, the deep desire to believe that if things go wrong someone must be at fault, because the alternative is to accept that sometimes things go wrong because in a fallen world things just go wrong, and that we are swept along in a history we cannot redirect very much. It is an oddly un-conservative way of thinking but one found a lot among the more ideologically engaged conservatives, who believe in the power of politics to change the world. The corollary is that if it doesn’t change in the right direction, someone must be at fault.
While We’re At It, First Things, November 2013 (pay wall).
A recent issue of the New Republic includes a long review of a new book, FDR and the Jews, examining FDR’s handling of Germany and the Holocaust, and finding that he did not do as well as he could have done but did well in difficult circumstances, “motivated primarily by a wish to address the great problems of the day in a manner that would sustain him and his party politically.” FDR was working, notes the reviewer, Ira Katznelson of Columbia, “in light of the order of his priorities, his perception of the political climate, and his navigation of conditions not of his choosing,” including the political impossibility of changing American immigration policy.
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Which is, of course, one of the points we have to keep making about Pius XII, who had to make excruciating decisions about what to say and what not to say, because people would suffer and die if he said the wrong thing, but who receives from his critics no such understanding as Roosevelt receives here.
While We’re At It, First Things, November 2013 (pay wall).
David Bentley Hart, Orthodox philosopher and writer for, inter alia, First Things, described Donald Trump as “A Person You Flee at Parties” (the title) and “developer, speculator, television personality, hotelier, political dilettante, conspiracy theorist, and grand croupier.”
If you’re wanting me to comment on that, read it again; I can’t possibly top it.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 