In Praise of Prejudice, the latest volume from the superb essayist Theodore Dalrymple, is a delightful addition to his oeuvre. It's a quick read that makes an essential point in Dalrymple's inimitable prose: prejudice is necessary for humans.

This is hardly a popular position. As the author notes, "I very much doubt whether anyone, at least in polite company, would admit to a prejudice about anything." He then sardonically draws out the implications: To judge by self-report, we have never lived in such unprejudiced times, with so many people in complete control of their own opinions, which are, as a result, wholly sane, rational, and benevolent. Nobody judges anything, any person or any question, except by the light of the evidence and his own reason."

As we all know, this description is hardly accurate. People continue, as they have always done, to think and act on habit, desire, authority and other unexamined grounds. People are simply incapable of functioning in a fully rational manner, and given the finite nature of human knowledge and reason, most of what is "known" is, and always will be, accepted on authority for most people.

Why then is there such a hue and cry against prejudice itself, then? Why not simply declare that the old prejudices against, say, giving birth out of wedlock were bad, but that the new prejudice against smoking is good? The answer, Dalrymple believes, is found in the uses skepticism is put to today. It isn't used to strip away until we finally locate a firm first principle (a la Descartes). Rather, it is "to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites." People are not skeptics about electrical theory, or the arrangement of the solar system, but "a ferocious and insatiable spirit of inquiry overtakes them, however, the moment they perceive that their interests are at stake--their interests here being their freedom, of license, to act upon their whims."

The breakdown of old prejudices may ease the social pressures to conform to standards of behavior, but the consequences are grim. The small graces of life fall by the wayside, as say, commuters are no longer willing to give up seats to the elderly and pregnant women. Worse, entire lives are plunged into vicious circumstances; the rate of illegitimacy among Britain’s underclass is similar to that of America’s inner-city black population, with similar results. A telling example of the change in perception is presented by Dalrymple:

Not long ago I watched an old British comedy film from the 1950s, in which a young man of the upper-middle class had made a working-class girl pregnant. The girl’s indignant father demanded that the young man should marry his daughter, a demand whose justice he understood and at once agreed to. The audience howled with laughter at the primitive idea that the future birth of a child created an inescapable obligation on the part of the father.

Furthermore, the elimination of social prejudices necessarily leads to a more authoritarian state, as people refuse to recognize any authority between themselves and the law. The restraint that people formerly exercised because they had internalized the standards of community, family, church, and the like, must now be externally applied by government force.

Visiting my fiancé at her law school, I noticed an empty Miller Lite can sitting in the snow outside a nearby apartment. Considering it, I knew that I wouldn’t leave it around, not because of anti-littering laws, or reasoning about the economic or ecological impact of leaving empty beer cans about, but because I was raised to consider such tasteless, crude, and something that is just not done. And, if nothing else, if I were to leave the remnants of a celebratory drinking spree lying about, I’d be sure to want it to be something classier than Miller Lite. It’s pure prejudice, but it keeps me from throwing my trash about.

In this excellent book, Dalrymple demonstrates how such prejudices are essential to civilized life.

Since his rapid ascent to the front of the pack, Huckabee has been subjected to ferocious criticism from the conservative chattering class. This has prompted an anti-anti-Huckabee backlash, primarily from evangelical supporters of Huck who see the attacks on him as evidence that the conservative establishment just doesn't like evangelicals that much, except as suckers for votes. Huckabee himself has voiced this theory.
However, I don't think that's accurate. The real problem isn't evangelicals, but social conservatives--evangelicals are simply the largest and most organized group of social conservatives in the GOP. Rod Dreher comments that:

It's funny, but when it looked like Rudy Giuliani, a social liberal, was going to be the nominee, we didn't see many, if any, establishment Republican opinion leaders freaking out over what kind of danger to the future of the party and the nation he represented...I think it's fair to say that it was assumed that Giuliani would be a sound representative of the Republican Party, and that the social and religious conservatives would do like they always do and get in line. Pat Robertson sure did.
But lo, it turns out that the candidate who's caught fire comes straight out of the religious/social conservative wing of the coalition, and he is unsound on issues most important to the fiscal wing. It's not supposed to work that way. Nobody at the elite level seems to expect the economic conservatives to suck it up for the sake of party unity.

George Will confirms this from the other side.

Huckabee's campaign actually is what Rudy Giuliani's candidacy is misdescribed as being -- a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs. Giuliani departs from recent Republican stances regarding two issues -- abortion and the recognition by law of same-sex couples. Huckabee's radical candidacy broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America's corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.

(As an aside, Ross Douthat takes apart Will's overheated "blood libel" rhetoric concerning Huckabee here).

Social conservatives, according to Will and his ilk, are supposed to remain permanent second-class members of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. What's especially galling is that Will is enough of an intellectual conservative to know that he is being disingenuous. Gay marriage, and even abortion, are more recent conservative concerns than free trade, but that's only because liberals have pushed the envelope there more recently. Traditionalism, however, and concerns with culture, religion, the family, etc... have always been a crucial part of conservatism. Surely Will is familiar with the work of, say, Russell Kirk. If social conservatism has grown in importance, it is because that is where the battle is, that is were liberals have pushed the hardest and met with the greatest success.

Will would have us believe that cutting taxes by, say, 5% is more essential to conservatism than opposing attempts to eliminate the family as a unit of any political significance. But libertinism is even more opposed to conservatism than socialism.

I'm still not a Huckabee supporter, but it's tempting as I see the attempts to reduce conservatism to money-grubbing presided over by the "sophists, economists, and calculators" that Edmund Burke despised.

My candidate in the GOP primary remains anyone but Rudy, but I must say that I'm drawn to Mike Huckabee. I know, I know, he's wobbly on all sorts of issues from immigration to big government. He's compassionate conservatism on steroids, and all that. So I won't be lining up to offer my allegiance to his campaign anytime soon. But I'm sure enjoying his rise.

The first reason is simple: he's one of us--evangelicals, that is. Even his flaws confirm this. I think evangelicals need to get over their opposition to evolution, but Huckabee's disbelief in it doesn't annoy me much, as it simply confirms that he's one of my people, warts and all.

The other main reason is that it is a sweet, sweet pleasure to watch the money-grubbing side of the GOP squirm. It probably isn't smart politics (or very good for my soul), but I'm enjoying the panic of the pundits who have been telling the unwashed socially-conservative masses to shut up and do as their told. Well, the peasants have found their pitchforks and torches. The Rudy movement is an attempt to permanently marginalize the social conservatives in the GOP coalition; watching Huck top Rudy nationally is delectable to those of us who think it's more important that the GOP oppose abortion than every tax increase.

I offer this because I suspect that a fair number of my fellow evangelicals feel the same way. It's not entirely rational, but neither is politics.

I would like to thank D.R. Tucker for his post below, which should end the debate over Dr. Ryn's labeling neoconservatism as modern Jacobism. As Tucker describes it in his raptures, neoconservatism has all the hallmarks of Jacobism: preening self-righteousness, a substitution of sentimentality for virtue, a Rousseauian worldview, imperialist ambitions, and a denial of original sin.

He asks, “what is wrong with the belief that the default position of the human spirit is freedom, and that it is a good and positive thing to support the spread of freedom and oppose tyranny?” Well, if we examine the historical record there’s not much evidence that the default position of the human spirit is freedom. In fact, it’s rather the opposite. And to the extent that people do value freedom, it ranks rather below other concerns, such as security and order. The situation is not, as Rousseau and his modern neoconservative followers hold, that man is born free and everywhere in chains. Rather, man is invariably born in chains, and sometime attains some measure of freedom. Tucker might not like this much, but them’s the breaks, and any policy that refuses to deal with the human condition as it is, will result in disaster.

Tucker also impugns the motives of his opponents, who he insists on calling liberals, though many conservatives loath the neoconservative ideas he sets forth (what could possibly be conservative about worldwide war to impose democratic capitalism?). Anyone who opposes neoconservatism is simply a dictator-loving idiot, in his view. Tucker, meanwhile, operates (in his own mind) from noble motives. His opponents must therefore be either evil or stupid (or both). This is exacerbated by his perception of human nature and society.

He writes that, “The neoconservative vision understands the way human nature operates: it recognizes that dictatorships, political oppression and ideological extremism are abnormalities.” Historically considered, this is ridiculous. Clearly, Tucker is operating from an ideal independent of historical circumstance. There’s a reason so many neoconservatives were former Marxists; they retained the same ambition of remaking the world according to their metaphysical vision of material human progress, they merely altered the vehicle from communism to democratic capitalism. They thus embrace American exceptionalism, only to hold that it means that America has the unique ability to remake the world in its image.

This is why neoconservatism is intrinsically anti-Christian: it is, in effect, a substitute religion, where the eschaton is immanentized (in Voegelin’s memorable phrase). Injustice and suffering are not a permanent part of the human condition, in their view, but the result of faulty social organization. Virtue therefore becomes an assent to the right theory of remaking society (for neoconservatives, this is worldwide democratic capitalism), rather than a struggle over the sinful part of one’s own nature.

Their view is extremely dangerous. Their disregard of human sin and the complexities of culture leads them to embark on grandiose projects for remaking societies in their ideal image. Failure is attributed not to their own folly (admitting this would entail repenting of their false substitute religion, which they will not do), but to the wickedness of others. Thus, a neoconservative like John Podhoretz went from seeking freedom for the middle east to contemplating genocide against it in one notorious column. Lacking any sense of realism, neoconservatism, like Jacobism, ends in the gallows and the guillotine.

As for Iraq, if we’re lucky, we’ll end up leaving something like Jordan or Egypt when we leave. Hardly the great triumph the neoconservatives promised.

Over at the Washington Post, the editors of the ironically named Reason magazine are singing the praises of Ron Paul and libertarianism. They write that:

Now with about 5 percent (and climbing) support in polls of likely Republican voters, Paul set a one-day GOP record by raising $4.3 million on the Internet from 38,000 donors on Nov. 5 -- Guy Fawkes Day, the commemoration of a British anarchist who plotted to blow up Parliament and kill King James I in 1605. Paul's campaign, which is three-quarters of the way to its goal of raising "$12 Million to Win" by Dec. 31, didn't even organize the fundraiser -- an independent-minded supporter did.
When a fierce Republican foe of the wars on drugs and terrorism is able, without really trying, to pull in a record haul of campaign cash on a day dedicated to an attempted regicide, it's clear that a new and potentially transformative force is growing in American politics.

As anyone with a basic knowledge of English history and culture will have noticed, this is a complete misrepresentation of Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot. Fawkes was motivated by religion (a Catholic, he wanted to blow up the Protestant king and parliament), not anarchist ideals. And Guy Fawkes day is not, as they imply, a commemoration of the gunpowder plot, but of the foiling of it.

Color me unconvinced by the historical fiction of Ron Paul's fans.

William Saletan of Slate is a brave, brave man. His latest pieces tackle the subject of genetics, intelligence, and divergent human populations. And yes, he tackles it, rather than timidly approaching it, peering at it for a moment, and then scampering away.

The problem is simple: there is at least some genetic basis for intelligence. Various human populations lived in relative genetic isolation for many generations. There is no reason to suppose that evolution stopped for those populations, and in fact tests show fairly persistent differences in average IQ (as well as differences in other physical traits) between various populations.

Obviously the implications of this are legion, but I'd like to consider just a couple. First, presuming that the data Saletan discusses is correct, and evolution didn't stop acting on human intelligence 50,000 (or so) years ago, how will a fundamentally materialist society preserve notions of human dignity and equality?

Furthermore, given the emphasis liberals place on race (just visit your average state university to see examples of its overwhelming importance to them) how will they react if there really are (on average) significant biological differences between various human populations?

Of course, the Christian view is that regardless of whatever genetic differences there may be at either the individual or population level, all human beings must be treated with dignity and respect. Also, because a person is not the combined averages of his racial and social groups, everyone must be treated with on a personal basis.

I can't but wonder, though, how liberals, for whom racial groups are of such great importance, will react to actual scientific analysis of racial groups.

The latest outrage uncovered by FIRE almost reads like a parody.

Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”

According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as “treatments.”

In my last post I mentioned Dr. Ryn, one of my professors and the author of (among other works), America the Virtuous, an intellectual examination of neo-Jacobinism and the neoconservatives who exemplify it. This sets him against ideologues like David Frum and Richard Perle, whose grandiosely titled An End to Evil demonstrates the insane vision they have of a virtuous America waging worldwide war for democratic capitalism until evil is finally trounced once and for all. Ryn notes that evil is an intrinsic part of the human condition, and is best combated not with tanks and politics, but with personal moral struggle.

In my view, Ryn's thesis has been thoroughly demonstrated in Iraq, where America may, if we are lucky, just eke out a victory, albeit on much-reduced terms. The visions of spreading democracy and freedom through the middle east have crumbled to dust in the sands of Iraq; now we'll be happy just to kill the terrorists and keep them from ruling Iraq when we leave.

Elizabeth, however, has some quarrels to pick with Dr. Ryn, and I look forward to seeing what she brings against him.

Ironically, returning to school has limited my ability to write about higher education. I'm too busy with classes to worry much about abuses at other schools, and CUA isn't a constant source of politically correct liberal folly the way Oregon State was. Since I haven't anything to complain about except Latin homework, I thought I'd share one of the essays I've read here. Imaginative Origins of Modernity: Life as Daydream and Nightmare is easily among the best reads I've had this term, and I think that the interest will be shared by readers of this blog. One good paragraph:

It might seem far-fetched and paradoxical to connect the modern dreams of a marvelous new world with cynicism and bitterness. And yet the interplay between these seeming opposites is integral to the moral-imaginative dynamic under examination. On the one hand, modern man uses his imagination to an unparalleled extent to evade the hard and painful task of moral responsibility up close: He always dreams of happiness on entirely different, far easier terms, of a life that can satisfy all of his pent-up desires. As long as he indulges this imagination he is intoxicated, inspired. But just as often the dark side of life seems to him to be all there is, and he despairs of happiness. Bitterness and pessimism torture him.

Also, you can buy Dr. Ryn's critique of neoconservatism as a form of the modern flight from moral responsibility here.

So Al Gore has been given the Nobel Peace Prize; I'm sure he'll plant a few extra trees to offset the cost of his trip to Sweden to accept it.

I have no expertise in studying climate patterns, so I won't comment on that. What is worth comment (and is in an area I know something about) is the mentality behind the whole global warming movement. Like many other things wrong with our culture, it can largely be traced back to Rousseau, who more than anyone else made moral laziness respectable. It is human nature to want to feel good about oneself and place blame elsewhere. Real improvement of one's moral character and of the world around one is difficult, requiring a great deal of effort. Rousseau spread the notion that goodness comes not from great struggles of the soul, from sacrifice and efforts of will, but from having lovely feelings. Read his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, if you can bear to, and you'll find him explaining how nothing he did, even abandoning his children, was due to evil on his part. No one, he says, has ever had such good nature as he. But society is corrupt, and it prevented his glorious self from being properly expressed.

The connection to Gore is obvious. He and his followers can continue to trash the earth by jetting around it, perhaps throwing a few dollars at some tree-planting to relieve some guilt, while feeling themselves virtuous. They can do exactly what they say is wrong (burn fossil fuels in abundance) and feel themselves superior to the rest of us, on the sole that they, unlike us, care about the earth and the danger of global warming. No moral effort or self-sacrifice is needed; endorse the right policies, worry about the right issues, and you are automatically virtuous.

As I've made clear on here, I'm not a great fan of Ann Coulter. But I think the latest controversy surrounding her is ridiculous. Christians believe that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures--he was the Messiah. Consequently, we believe that Jews (and everyone else, as Christ came for the whole world) should become Christians. It's a very basic doctrine that has existed from the founding of the church. The disciples, who were all Jewish, tried to convince their fellow Jews that Jesus was the Messiah, and they also sought to spread this news to the gentiles.

Miss Coulter could have probably have expressed this better than she did, but anyone who objects to it has a problem with Christianity, not with Ann Coulter. And I understand why those Jews who take Judaism seriously would dislike Christianity: in their view Christians are heretics following a false Messiah. But they should be honest in admitting that it is Christianity itself they object to, not Ann Coulter restating basic Christian doctrine.

Considering the threats by conservative Christian leaders to back an third-party candidate if Rudy gets the nomination, Jim Geraghty has published excerpts from an e-mail I wrote him when he asked for opinions on the matter. No one who reads my posts on here will be surprised at what I say. I think accepting Rudy's candidacy would be a disaster for pro-lifers, and would want the full force of the pro-life grassroots (bloody fetus pictures and all) to raise a ruckus.

Another correspondent neatly summed up the problem with Rudy: “Once a pro-choice candidate is elected, the pro-choice forces within the Republican party will know that our votes are a given and that means we will have no real influence… The pro-life voters will be to Republicans what black voters have become to Democrats — a reliable constituency that must be humored but never taken seriously because their votes are guaranteed.”

That's true, but it isn't just the pro-choicer wing of the GOP we have to worry about. A great many GOP politicians really don't care one way or another about abortion, but they toe the line enough to keep the conservative Christian yahoos (that's us!) voting for them. A Rudy win moves that line dramatically. All they'll have to do is promise not to actively encourage abortion, and they'll be good. Pro-life, pro-choice, it won't matter. They can mutter sweet nothings about judges and be in the clear, with no need to wade into that messy and controversial abortion issue.

The one political weapon we have against this is the threat of not voting for them and raising a ruckus. If we don't use that against Rudy, we will never use it, proving it to be merely a hollow threat.

Elizabeth,
If I might offer my opinion regarding Miss Coulter, I think Florence King did the definitive demolition last year for National Review. I don't object to Miss Coulter because she's mean, per se, but because she's wasting talent and influence. Her writing has become lazy, narcissistic and pandering. She's found her niche, has made big piles of cash from it, and is sticking with it. Most people would do the same.

But for all her influence, she's edifying no one. In fact, her writing has the opposite effect. Her fans are never challenged, either intellectually or morally. Miss Coulter's books are meant to reinforce their views, and to enrage them against liberals. The last is especially problematic. Her readers are provided with a sense of self-righteousness without having to undertake any moral effort. The problem with America, we are told, is those evil (and stupid) people advocating their wicked political views. But for them, all would be well. Virtue is judged by the political views one holds.

Now, of course I think that liberalism is wrong, and that liberals are bad people. But I think conservatives are bad people too. When we focus (as Miss Coulter does) only on the wrongness of our opponents, we begin to conceive of ourselves as good. Just because we are on the side of the angels doesn't mean we are angels. I fear that Miss Coulter's writings inculcate an implicit understanding that society's ills are due only to those criminal, slanderous, treasonous, godless and brainless liberals, rather than endemic in the human condition.

I'm sure that this opinion will be about as popular on Human Events as the pope at a NARAL rally, so the comments section may prove interesting. And you can always do your part to increase her books sold lead over me (currently score is a few million to zero).

Tuesday morning the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (full disclosure: they’re my favorite higher ed nonprofit), help a conference at the National Press Club to release the results of their latest survey of civic literacy and higher education. The title was appropriately blunt, “Failing our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America’s History and Institutions.” The basis was a survey ISI commissioned from the University of Connecticut’s Dept. of Public Policy. It was given to over 14,000 college freshmen and seniors, and assessed their knowledge of American history and government, America and the world and the market economy. The basis of analysis was simple: compare the scores of the freshmen at a school to those of the seniors in order to see how four years of undergraduate education has improved their civic knowledge.

You can take the survey yourself here. The questions are hardly esoteric.

The results were grim. No school could claim even a “C” average for its seniors. Harvard, whose senior class performed the best, scraped a “D+.” Even worse, college, on average, hinders the acquisition of civic knowledge , and the most expensive and prestigious schools often decreased their students’ understanding of basic American civics. Of the 50 schools surveyed, the bottom five included Princeton, Duke, Yale, and Cornell, all of which saw seniors post lower scores than their freshmen did. Harvard was the best of the Ivy League, boosting scores from 63.6% to 69.6%.

The top five schools were Eastern Conn. State U (with a gain of 9.7% in scores), Marian College (+9.4%), Murray State U. (+9.1%), Concordia U. (+9%), and St. Cloud State U. (+8.6%). To be sure, the more prestigious schools generally had higher scores from both freshman and seniors. But the evidence is clear that, for example, Yale students outperformed their Pfeiffer U. counterparts because of excellence before college. Yale attendees lost basic civic knowledge (-3.1%), while Pfeiffer U. students gained (+8.25%). What’s the point of the best high school kids in the nation going to Yale when it will take them from a “C-” to a “D” over four years? Pfeiffer might be getting third-rate students, but at least they’re learning.

This study controlled for different course concentrations not by asking about majors, but by asking students how many courses they had taken in civics (American history, economics, and the like). This allowed the researchers to see how scores improved (or didn’t) as a result of civics courses. Once again, Yale, Duke, Princeton, and Cornell took 4 of the 5 lowest spots. Students at Cornell fared the worst, with the average student losing 1.8% on the test for each civics course taken. Concordia U. was the best, with students gaining 3.72% for each civics course.

As dramatic as some of these results are (go to Yale, lose knowledge!), the problem isn’t just in those schools where seniors scored lower than the freshman. College is supposed to draw the best and brightest for further instruction, and schools love to proclaim that they are producing better citizens. But for many schools, the rate of knowledge acquisition in the undergraduate years was slower than it had been previously. At U. Penn., students were barely nudged, from a 62.7% to a 63.5%. Random guessing would score 20% on the multiple choice test. So we can assume that 1st through 12th grades increased student scores by at least 42.7%. Four more years of education at U. Penn. added only another .8%, even though the “D” average of incoming freshman left plenty of room for upward movement.

Americans spend billions on higher education. Parents save to pay for their children, state and federal governments spend oodles on universities, Americans owe tens of billions of dollars in student loans, and donors give billions in charitable donations to schools. But this doesn’t produce even a minimally informed citizenry. In fact, the study found that the more tuition cost, the less student scores improved. Clearly, there needs to be accountability, and it is to be hoped that ISI’s study will help provide that. The results have been released to the schools as well as the media, in the hope that interested parties will take action.

At the conference I asked whether part of the problem might not be that the consumers of higher education don’t want civic literacy so much as advanced career prospects. Most students, in my view, go to college so they may earn more money later, not because they are interested in the life of the mind. Many view universities as nothing more than glorified job training firms. Those presenting the report agreed that this was indeed part of the problem (the very idea of “consumers” of education was cited as harmful to the traditional mission of the university), but insisted that those responsible for higher education must stand firm and insist that they have a mission to produce knowledgeable citizens as well as qualified employees.

A fellow CUA grad student, one Eric Johnston, had an op-ed published in the New York Times today. This is inspiring--perhaps I too could have my work printed in paper that likes to give illegal in-kind contributions to leftist groups. Unfortunately, the piece was a bust. It argues that while Rudy might be a louche pro-abortion lapsed Catholic adulterer, he's the best possible candidate for pro-lifers. As a political theory student, I'm unfamiliar with the theology folks, but I expected better reasoning than this from them. But evidently they spend too much time calculating how many angels can dance on the grave of a pinhead, or something like that.

Mr. Johnston's entire case rests on Rudy's perceived opposition to the Roe vs. Wade ruling. The notion is that someone who supports legal abortion can more convincingly make the case that Roe was a bad decision and should be overturned, thereby returning abortion to the states to regulate. But this point is by no means established.

First, Rudy waffles when asked about Roe, as Mr. Johnston himself notes.

In a televised Republican debate, Mr. Giuliani said it would be “O.K.” if Roe were overturned but “O.K. also” if the Supreme Court viewed it as a binding precedent.

After reading that, who wouldn't be convinced that Rudy will cheerfully lead an anti-Roe crusade, and do it much more effectively than any other Republican could? Who could doubt the sincerity of his anti-Roe sentiment?

Mr. Johnston then notes that Rudy has promised to nominate "strict constructionists." And I'm sure he'd do a much better job of it than, say, Fred Thompson, who guided John Roberts through the confirmation process.

The truth is that Rudy only cares about Roe because it's created problems for his presidential campaign. He will certainly not put any effort into explaining why it should be overturned, rather, he will continue to avoid the issue as much as possible. He might appoint good judges, but his rhetoric doesn't match his record. As mayor he didn't work hard to appoint strict constructionists. But by some happy accident, he has discovered that he approves of that judicial philosophy just as he began his run for the Republican nomination.

I realize that the pro-life movement has become a cheap date for Republican politicians, but acquiescing to Rudy would be the end. If we can be had for nothing more than a weak promise to appoint "strict constructionists," we will lose all influence in the Republican Party--and we haven't any with the Democrats.

I'm sorry to be hard on any of my university, but there it is, this piece showed little imagination and no talent. I suspect its only real claim is the novelty of the argument. And while it is fashionable in some circles to produce perversely contrary theories, I think Mr. Johnston would have showed to much greater advantage had he not tried so hard to upend the conventional wisdom--though perhaps then he would not have been published in the New York Times.

(For the record, I do not know Mr. Johnston, and have nothing against him but his atrocious op-ed. I would be glad to discuss this more amiably over a beer with him sometime.)

The start of grad school has me pretty busy, but this Theodore Dalrymple piece on how UNCIF accidentally caused the largest mass-poisoning in human history needs to be read.

Read it, bookmark it, send it to everyone you know.

Contemplating the story I mentioned Monday, I think there’s more of significance than the relative academic merits of a Baptist college’s homemaker curriculum and a secular university’s women’s studies program. The sad reality is that the homemaker curriculum, by including a classic liberal education with vacuuming tips (or whatever), is better than anything available at most American institutions of higher education. In short, it’s not just the feminists’ fault (though the comparison is delicious).

Higher education has been commandeered by two forces, neither of which is conservative. The first is the political and social radicalism we on the Right have been criticizing since God and Man at Yale (before that, really, but Buckley’s book serves as a useful milestone). The second is a consumerist, materialistic, market-driven society, and here the Right has been too hesitant in its condemnation. Sure, plenty of commentators have denounced declining intellectual standards, but not enough have made the connection to the market.

I don’t mean to get into a discussion of conservatism and capitalism now—that would take far too long. It is sufficient here to say that however much we defend free enterprise we must recognize it as only part of a healthy society. And higher education, properly understood, should be kept away from the market, along with other portions of human life, such as religion and family.

Unfortunately, as college became seen as a sure ticket to white-collar prosperity it has become a feeder for the job market. Employers use it as a screening device and majors like exercise and sports science, communications, business management, interior design, journalism, and marketing come to dominate. These are trades, not academic disciplines.

The traditional humanities have been ravaged by political correctness and deconstructionism or pushed out as irrelevant—hence the lack of classics programs at most state schools. Knowing Latin and having a thorough understanding of Plato’s Republic may be an impressive, but it doesn’t provide many marketable skills. And most people go to college so they can get a middle-class job after graduation, not because they are intellectually curious.

Ironically, the great push for egalitarian education in service of market meritocracy has not elevated the masses, but pulled down education. It was complained that everyone should have access to a good education, not just scholars and the moneyed leisure class. That is, only those able to be unconcerned with the market could get a good education. We may be coming full circle, as once again those outside the market, in this case housewives, are the ones getting a good education.

The Reuters storyline seemed so simple: a Baptist seminary in Texas has created a new women-only concentration in homemaking. Just another example of those crazy fundamentalists and their insistence that women be kept barefoot and pregnant, only leaving the kitchen to bring their male overlords supper. I'll admit to cringing a bit at first, mostly because a revitalized home economics major seemed a perversion of the academic ideal: housekeeping shouldn't be the business of higher education.

But then I got to the description of the program and saw this:

It's a ... four-year program. Two years of classical Latin, two years of classical Greek. It requires them to read almost all of the great books of the Western world.

I did my undergraduate work at Oregon State University, a state school with close to 20,000 students, and it was impossible to get such an education there. Latin and Greek weren't offered. Reading the great books of Western civilization was generally discouraged. Even if the teaching at this Baptist seminary is fourth-rate (and it is probably better than that), these poor, oppressed homemakers being groomed to serve the patriarchy will be far more erudite and intellectually informed than any graduate of a women's studies program.

The benighted Baptists are teaching their future housewives the classic intellectual languages and having them read the great literature, and philosophy of our culture. The progressive feminists are teaching their future liberated, independent women to vapidly mouth liberal platitudes and having them read jargon-cluttered banalities.

Lest my exchanges with Elizabeth turn acrimonious, here is an attempt to sum up my position. The main point of my first post reviewing Behe’s book is that it may split the anti-Darwin coalition. I think this would be a very good thing, as someone like Behe, a theistic evolutionist who thinks he can prove the theistic part, shouldn’t be getting along swimmingly with people who detest theistic evolution as betraying Christianity and think that Noah’s ark carried dinosaurs. The fundamentalists insisting on a literal exegesis of Genesis should, in my view, be marginalized since they are promoting bad science, bad hermeneutics, and “bringing the gospel into disrepute," to quote Augustine.

Before continuing, I also want to lay out some terms and definitions. These definitions are, to the best of my knowledge, in line with those used by Behe and the scientific mainstream.

Common descent: All life on earth is related and descended from a single ancient ancestor.

Natural selection: Those organisms better suited for their environment will out-compete and out-breed those less suited. This will shift the genetic balance of a population.

Random mutation: Mutations (changes in the genetic code) happen indifferently (without regard to what might help or hurt the organism) and are acted on by natural selection. Some help, some harm, some are basically neutral.

Darwinism: This combines the three ideas above. It states that all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor via random mutations that were acted on by natural selection.


Now here is where things get sticky. Everyone accepts that random mutations happen. Everyone accepts that natural selection happens, and acts on those mutations (indeed, anti-Darwinists have very often used this to make their case, arguing that natural selection usually results in dead mutants and that intermediate/transitional forms wouldn’t survive).

But agreement ends. Some people reject common descent, believe that mutation and natural selection operate only on small scales (microevolution) and that God created the species.
Others, like Behe, believe that God directed that evolution of the species from a common ancestor. In this view God designed certain mutations to be acted on by natural selection, with an end of intelligent life in mind. Random mutation wouldn’t have produced what we see, so the mutations much have been nonrandom.
Others, like myself, think that God used and directed evolution, but don’t presume this can be scientifically proven.
Others simply don’t consider God and believe that life as we know it evolved on its own via Darwinian processes.
Finally, some conflate Darwinian evolution with philosophical naturalism, and use it as a cudgel against religion.

I hope that stating all this will help us understand what we are discussing and how we disagree.

Sometimes the glass is half-full, sometimes the glass is half-empty, and sometimes the glass is taken away entirely. Little Green Footballs noticed a story explaining that doctors in Scotland are being banned from eating at their desks. You see, some health care workers in the UK are Muslim, and Muslims are required to fast in the daytime throughout Ramadan. It is thought that the sight of infidels eating could inflame the passions of the piously fasting Muslim, perhaps leading to rash actions--like driving a flaming jeep into an airport terminal. Meanwhile, forcing busy doctors and nurses to forgo a quick bite on the job will foster understanding and make for a "positive and tolerant culture at work."

There is much to mock here, and I hope Mr. Steyn makes full use of it. As Chesterton wrote, "Always be comic in a tragedy, what the deus else can you do?" We might as well be happy warriors as the barbarians try to take away our sandwiches.

(Note: In writing my review for The Edge of Evolution, I found myself with far more to say than any single post of reasonable length could accommodate. Therefore, I’ll be posting separate sections of the review. In this first portion, I’ll focus on the background of anti-Darwinism and the likely influence of Behe’s book on the movement; in future sections I’ll delve into the details of the book itself.)

Charles Francis Adams observed of William Jennings Bryan that, “He is in one sense Scripturally formidable, for he is unquestionably armed with the jawbone of an ass.” It is a common opinion that Bryan’s religious heirs are packing a donkey’s mind (and legendary bloody-mindedness) as well. Over four score years since Bryan’s tactical win/strategic loss in the Scopes trial, the anti-evolution forces are as strong as ever. Hopefully, Michael Behe’s latest book, The Edge of Evolution, will change that.

At first glance, an anti-Darwinism publication might not seem likely to do so. But the dynamics of the creationist/intelligent design/anti-evolution movement(s) are convoluted enough that such may be the result.

Behe, the biochemist who became a leader of the intelligent design movement a decade ago with his book Darwin’s Black Box, is back, and much of what he has to say should be heresy to many of his supporters. Behe, it turns out, believes that all life on earth descended from a common ancestor via mutations acted on by natural selection (see, for example, pages 3, 12, 65, 70, 72, 83 and 232). That’s not a position likely to go over well with the average Christian fundamentalist anti-evolutionist. But Behe is almost universally praised by such, and condemned by scientists.

This odd situation arises because Behe argues that random mutations aren’t able to power evolution via common descent–the biomechanics of life are too complex for indifferent mutations to produce. Consequently, he asserts, life was designed and some designer was behind certain mutations. Hence, his reception, like everything else to do with evolution in America, is complicated. Understanding will be helped by consider the variety in the anti-Darwin camp.

A Brief History of Creationism
First, there are the creationists, the original anti-evolutionists, who are dedicated to a literal reading of the whole Bible: Man wasn’t descended from monkeys, the earth is only a few thousand years old, the big bang is a big lie, etc… There are variations like old-earth creationism (man didn’t come from apes, but the earth’s age has lots more zeros on it), but the fundamentals are the same: Christian fundamentalists fighting what they see as an attack on their religion.

Millions of people, including many intelligent and educated ones, believe this. To those on the outside, this seems nutty, but the psychology is understandable. It isn’t just that the adherents take their religion so seriously that if their interpretation of Genesis contradicts that of the scientific mainstream, they assume the scientists are wrong. They also believe that the scientific evidence is on their side. For though many are intelligent and educated, they aren’t scientists nor do they posses a scientific cast of mind. Thus, if a “creation scientist” tells them some scientific-sounding sound-bite that plays to their prejudices, they’ll believe it. In their minds, the anti-evolution forces are the heroic Galileo sorts, standing up against the wrongheaded scientific establishment. Unable to weigh the evidence themselves, they trust in those who confirm what they already believe. If someone tells them that there aren’t fossils of transitional species, they won’t dig through paleontology journals and texts to see if he’s right.

But this movement, overtly religious and a scientific nonentity, never got anywhere, especially with their primary goal of eliminating evolution from public school classrooms, or at least adding creationism.

Intelligent Design (ID) is a more recent movement, and more modest in its claims. It isn’t concerned with defending the accuracy of a literal reading of Genesis. It argues only that life is too complex to have evolved by random mutation and natural selection, and therefore must have been designed by something/someone. While certainly disdained by the vast majority of scientists, at least its leaders tend to have PhDs.

Critics have sometimes described ID as simply a newer, slicker cover for old-school creationism, but that overstates the case. I think the ID folks weren’t setting out create a better marketing package for using Genesis as a scientific text. Behe, after all, is Catholic, not a Protestant fundamentalist. And in theory, the ID folks shouldn’t have been much more palatable to the creationists than the Darwinists. Behe’s attempts to prove theistic evolution should be despised by the creationists, who consider theistic evolutionists traitors to Christianity.

But a tacit agreement was struck. Intelligent design made anti-Darwinism look more respectable. Creationism provided masses of supporters. And so they stifled their internal disagreements and banded together under the broad anti-Darwinism banners.

Creationist Crackup?
However, I suspect that Behe is wearied by many of his fellow travelers. He repeatedly endorses common descent and declares the earth and universe to be billions of years old. Given that the anti-Darwin coalition is maintained by ignoring its internal divisions, this seems calculated to stir things up.

The current anti-Darwinist movement can only critique. There is no agreed model to replace Darwinian evolution, the ranks include everyone from theistic evolutionists who think they can scientifically prove the theistic part to those who think Genesis was meant to be God’s lab report and that Noah’s Ark carried dinosaurs.

Besides those clearly identified with one faction are many content to drift along in an ecumenical anti-Darwin haze. Ending the comity between the wildly divergent camps will force the undecided to settle on what they really believe. They might revert to the old-time religion of young-earth creationism, and ensure their place as an interesting religious fossil in the American record. Alternately, they may come to adopt a hermeneutics more in line with that of Augustine, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and Benedict XVI, and thereby accept that Genesis isn’t a lab report.

Behe has been lionized by millions to whom the notion of common descent was repugnant, and many more who were ambivalent on the matter. Hopefully his forthrightness will induce them to think again. Many mainstream reviewers considering Behe’s book only see a scientist attacking Darwinism and miss the internal dynamics. But in the long run, I suspect that its main effect may be to bring the anti-Darwinists closer to reality. And it is far better for both science and religion if some Christians think they can scientifically prove the theistic part of theistic evolution than it is if some Christians think the earth is only 10,000 years old and that humans have no relations to monkeys.

Over at the First Things blog, Father Neuhaus takes apart the New York Times' decision to have Richard Dawkins review Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge of Evolution. As Neuhaus points out, Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is simply too biased and vitriolic to give Behe's book anything like a fair review. The problem isn't that the review was negative, but that it was written by someone who was only going to produce a hatchet job. Clearly, the Times didn't want a relatively dispassionate rebuttal to Behe, which thousands of scientists could have been recruited to write (a neutral or positive verdict is out of the question at The Times). The Times wanted someone who would try to destroy Behe's book, and they got it.

Unfortunately, Neahaus missed a beat by not contrasting this to the treatment of Christopher Hitchens' latest polemic, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. As First Things noted, The Times gave that to Michael Kinsley, who gave it a predictably gushing review. Kinsley, of course, has never before shown any comprehension of philosophy and theology.

The standards at the once-reputable New York Times Book Review are clear. Books against religion will be handed to unqualified reviewers for predictably high praise. Books for religion (or that many believers will like, at least), will be handed to reviewers who will be certain to lambaste it.


For those interested, I've one chapter left in Behe's book, and should have my own review up early next week. Suffice it to say of Dawkins' review that he was so busy being vicious that he neglected to even make the best arguments for his case.

I think this piece on how Arizona's Prop. 300 is keeping illegal immigrant scofflaws from taking advantage of taxpayer-funded social services (like in-state tuition) was meant to make me feel sorry for the criminals. Instead, I just felt warm fuzzies. This is saving taxpayers millions of dollars, and hopefully will induce those here illegally to leave, and others to not come here illegally.

Quoth the lead:

Nearly 5,000 people in Arizona have been denied in-state college tuition, financial aid and adult education classes this year under a new state law banning undocumented immigrants from receiving those state-funded services.

It then provides a breakdown of the numbers and moves into the supposedly tear-jerking personal anecdotes.

Isela Meraz, a Phoenix College student, has been priced out of taking all the classes she wanted. Prices per class shot up to about $600, she said, up from the $250 she was paying pre-Proposition 300. This semester, she will take just one class instead of the four she had planned on.
"I want to learn so many things . . . and become something, and this just puts a limit on me," said Meraz, of west Phoenix. "Our parents have worked this country. And it's incredible to me that people approved this. I just don't understand."

If I may help this lady understand: You and your family broke into this country illegally. You have been taking advantage of programs meant to help Americans. And now you are complaining because the benefits you have de facto stolen by breaking into America are coming to an end. You say of you and your fellow "undocumented immigrants" that "our parents have worked this country." You're right. They have worked America. They've worked it over. They have filled our emergency rooms with people who don't pay for their health care. They have increased the number of unlicensed and uninsured drivers on our roads. They have filled our taxpayer-funded schools with their children, dragging down the quality of education for American children. They have raised our illegitimacy rates. They have committed a disproportionate number of crimes (beginning with the crime of illegally being in our nation) and burdened our police, courts and prisons. They have turned neighborhoods into slums. They have aided drug traffickers. They have increased gangs. They have eroded the cultural cohesion of America. And then they (which is to say, you and yours) have the temerity to demand that you not be punished for your crimes against America, to demand that you continue to receive services meant for Americans and and America's invited guests, and to demand that those services increase.

That is why people approved this. It isn't enough, but it's a start.

Heather MacDonald knows how to write an arresting lead. Her latest column in City Journal opens with this line: Mozart’s lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute’s nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano.

She explains:

Welcome to Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”), the style of opera direction now prevalent in Europe. Regietheater embodies the belief that a director’s interpretation of an opera is as important as what the composer intended, if not more so. By an odd coincidence, many cutting-edge directors working in Europe today just happen to discover the identical lode of sex, violence, and opportunity for hackneyed political “critique” in operas ranging from the early Baroque era to that of late Romanticism.

My musical taste is not so refined as it should be (which is to say that I have little knowledge of opera), but I nonetheless found MacDonald's piece to be interesting as well as educational. She chronicles the rise of such artistic atrocities and examines the history and possible future of the NYC Met, which has thus far resisted joining such desecration. It is a magnificent article, and I highly recommend it.

And yet, there was something lacking. Her explanation of the impetus behind such violation of the great cultural triumphs of Western civilization is incomplete. What she says is true. This is a mark of the triumph of adolescent culture; government subsidies do allow directors to stage productions that the public will never pay to see. She notes, quite rightly, that:

without Mozart or Verdi, the Regietheater director is nothing; he cannot even hope for third-rate avant-garde status. In a world where displaying bodily fluids in jars, performing sex acts in public, or trampling religious symbols will land you a gig at the Venice Biennale and a government grant, the only source of outrage still available to the would-be scourge of propriety is to desecrate great works of art.

MacDonald comes closest to a complete understanding of the cause whenshe notes that the directors of such outrages have a “simplistic understanding of human experience,” and complains that they seek to reduce everything to base urges by, for example, seeking to “unmask courtly decorum as just a cover for fornication.” But she stops there, neglecting to delve into the souls of the purveyors of such putrescence to see what is at the root of such a dismal view. This neglect is probably due to her disbelief in souls.

As a confirmed atheist, MacDonald can say nothing more than that these operatic savages lack Enlightenment values—hardly great spiritual insight. But she does speak more truly than she knows when she refers to “desecration” of great art. Reducing the great themes of opera to brute sex and violence is a literal taking away of the sacred. Nobility, love, loyalty and heroism are manifestations of the human soul, as are jealousy, avarice and pride. Great art is a window into the transcendent, by way of the human soul and condition.

MacDonald recognizes this to some extent, as evidenced by her worthy passion for great art. Her excellent essay in Why I Turned Right contained this memorable line that I’ve quoted before:

The professoriate had been given the greatest luxury society can offer: studying beauty. All they needed to do to justify that privilege was to help students see why they should fall on bended knees before Aeschylus, Mozart, or Tiepolo, in thanks for lifting us out of our usual stupidity and dullness. Instead they set themselves up as more important than the literature and art that it was their duty to curate and created and tangle of antihumanistic nonsense that merely licensed students’ ignorance.

What she fails to understand is how easily atheistic materialism destroys reverence for greatness and beauty. If humans don’t have souls, if we’re just meat machines, then love becomes lust, joy becomes pleasure, real diabolic cruelty becomes mere animal viciousness and sadism. All these elevated sentiments are mere illusions and pretensions, at root it’s all blood, semen, phlegm and digestive juices.

The condition of modern man, as Francis Schaeffer noted, is one of division, for he is incapable of living in accord with his philosophy. Man cannot be reduced to mere matter. The violation of great art is a scream against the transcendent—its existence is clearly evident in Mozart and Shakespeare, but modern man doesn’t believe it exists. And this is torment. Greatness must be brought down and shown to be merely muck and mud with paint on. It must be reduced, demystified, stripped naked and left shivering, unable to even feel mortification because shame has also been stripped away.

This, I believe, is the motivation behind the efforts to deconstruct great art and smother it in filth. MacDonald writes eloquently against this, but for all her perceptiveness, she is stymied by her atheism. How can she reasonably complain about desecration when nothing is sacred? Her sentiments and intuitions rise about her metaphysics. She knows that there is indeed such a thing as glory and that truth, love and beauty are real. And I hope this knowledge will lead her to the Source of these.

As with all good things on this mortal planet, the excellent collection of essays that comprise Why I Turned Right must end. Multiple themes run through these final pieces. There is a strong (even more than in the rest of the book) emphasis on liberalism’s failures. This naturally leads into the second theme, which is a hesitation among some to be called conservative. The honesty is appreciated, because several contributors are not so much conservative as anti-liberal (or at least anti-modern-liberalism).

The section opens with a delightful essay by Danielle Crittenden, who chronicles her flight from feminism. She was never a liberal, at least not on economics and foreign policy, but she had absorbed the feminism of the day. “What I didn’t understand—and tragically many young women still fail to understand—was that my seemingly modest and reasonable expectation for an exciting, productive, and happy life as a woman actually amounted to the grandest and most complex demand in the history of the human species.” It is not a good idea to tell women to postpone marriage until after 30 and pregnancy still later; the “career first, marriage and family later” track creates bitter old spinsters like Maureen Dowd.

Worse still is the notion that young men and women should each be his or her own moral philosopher. Most people aren’t equipped for a task of such intellectual and spiritual magnitude, and would be far better served by injunction to observe tradition and taboo.

Danielle was fortunate, marrying at 24, and having a baby at 28—ages that seemed shockingly young in her circles. And as she and her husband slowly groped their way through marriage and children, they found themselves back at the wisdom of the ages, even if they were both ashamed when they realized that they both preferred them. “Of course we put modern spin on it—I’m an ‘at-home mom’ as opposed to the ‘housewife’ of yore—but we have embraced a traditional model, in this as in dozens of other aspects of our lives.”


Tod Lindberg is the first of several writers at the end who, while on the right, are not necessarily conservatives. He is perhaps a neoconservative—at least a camp follower of them. Worshipful of Allan Bloom while at the University of Chicago, he is presumably Straussian, but he makes no explicit confession of it as others do.

I didn’t find this piece very engaging, either personally or philosophically. It’s best feature was a strong endorsement of the capability of humans to act as free moral agents.


Up next in the lineup of non-conservative right-turners is Sally Satchel, a psychiatrist with a tendency to run afoul of the PC police. Her conversion into a right-wing crusader had nothing to do with religion or metaphysics; it was grounded in the realization that liberal ideology didn’t work. Her writing is interesting enough, but remains at the level of anecdote (those wacky liberals and their pieties about race, class, and gender) and pragmatic rhetoric (of course we ought to restrain crazy crack addicts). It does not penetrate to the level of philosophy.


The last of these not-really-conservative right-wingers is Peter Berkowitz, who is something of a classical liberal, an enthusiast for the legacy of the Enlightenment, and an admirer of Leo Strauss. His tale is lucid and interesting, but his philosophy is sub-par. Even recognizing, like Eliot did, that “These men, and those who opposed them/And those whom they opposed/Accept the constitution of silence/And are folded in a single party,” it is difficult to reconcile, as he does, Burke and Mill, and claim them for the same tradition.


Before concluding with a discussion of Rich Lowry’s essay, I want to note that though the last three pieces left me only lukewarm, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth reading. First, it’s important for conservatives to understand their allies on the right. Secondly, not everyone wants to read David Brooks on the metaphysical underpinnings of conservatism, let alone argue about the specifics. Nor does every reader want to mull over the views of Joseph Bottum on the codependent tension between religion and the government in American. For some, Sally Satchel’s expose of how leftist ideology corrupts medicine is more interesting and convincing. Besides, one of the purposes of a collection to provide variety, so don’t take my only half-hearted enthusiasm for a few as representative.


The final essay is Rich Lowry’s tale of how he came to be living the dream of ever young conservative writer: Editor-in-chief of National Review. His tone is whimsical, without deviating too far from the story. Lowry was always on the right, but his journey to conservatism began with Reagan and continued with Buckley and National Review.

As a high school student, he led a “double existence.” He relates of he and his friends that “If high school had been an ape colony, we would have been those antisocial unattached males lingering on the fringes, envying those dominant males with their mates…We skipped class and drank lots of down-market beer…” And yet, while living as a seeming slacker, he read National Review cover to cover, watched Firing Line, and brought the American Spectator on weekend trips to the beach with the guys.

These admissions would be humiliating (slacker and nerd? Ouch) but Lowry presents them so good-naturedly that the sting is gone. His disinterest in preserving his dignity creates a delightfully personable essay that shows the best of youthful conservatism. It prickles at liberal orthodoxies while acknowledging the value of the permanent things. Certainly it is not stogy or hidebound.

Such is a good note to end this book on. As I’ve meandered through it, some pieces have appealed more than others, but all have provided insight into the coalition of the right, and why people join it. And that alone is worth the price of admission.

So Ward Churchill, the infamous agitator and academic fraud, has been axed for his many violations of academic standards. But as you can see from the comments, he isn't without his defenders. The most common defense seems to be that he was only caught because his political views drew scrutiny to his academic work, and therefore should be let off. Apparently academic misconduct shouldn't be punished if the misdeeds are discovered because the culprit is a noxious political radical who likes attention. Of course, as is noted, Churchill's hiring and promotion were also political. He gained his position not on academic merit but on his political and social radicalism. Liberal academics have no just cause to complain about the reach of politics into the academy, because they're the ones who politicized it.

Did they really expect that they could transform academia into a cauldron of radical political and social liberalism without any repercussions from those paying their wages (parents and taxpayers)? Such naiveté is born from a remarkable degree of arrogance and self-delusion. Even when they, say, mock Christianity it a health class or rail against the President in an English course, they are convinced that they are scholars deserving the protections of "academic freedom."

But live by the politicized academy, die by the politicized academy. This isn't about professors writing op-eds in their spare time, it's about an academic climate that is extremely liberal--about politics injected into the classroom, the faculty senate, the hiring process, etc... It's about academics who view it as their job to ferment political and social upheaval.

Churchill's academic career existed because he was a political agitator and ethnic grievance-monger. Tenure was not created to protect such. And so long as the academy tries to have it both ways by being political but eschewing the consequences, I hope for many more firings.