Who am I to complain?

In his hit piece on the National Conservative Student Conference for Harper's,* Wells Tower paints a host of better known conservatives as reckless demagogues and Neanderthals: from Walter Williams's callous abandonment of the poor to private charity to Newt Gingrich's "naturally occurring candy dish of head bone," the luminaries of the conservative movement are made out to be heartless and paranoid freaks. And Tower portrays the young conservatives attending the conference as bloodthirsty (literally bunny-killing) idiots and borderline crazies. (Apparently conservative young people don't just smile when they're excited about a speaker, they brighten the room with "pandemic uncurtainings of happy teeth.")

Still, I can't help wishing that Tower hadn't 1) done his best to make me look like a know-nothing chauvinist and 2) got the actual point of my talk at the conference exactly backwards. Here's his paraphrase of my argument:

Elizabeth Kantor, when she gets up to speak, is also bent on promoting books that, on the face of it, are not conservative at all. She likes the classics: Shakespeare, Milton, T. S. Eliot. When arguing the superiority of Western civilization, you're at a disadvantage, she says, if your readerly horizons end at Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter. What's so pleasurable about reading the greats is not only that they're rich with human truths but also that they can be mined for object lessons in conservative values, or dismantled into rhetorical brickbats that make for good hurling in culture-war skirmishes.

Well, no. What I actually argued was that instead of picking up what Tower calls "rhetorical brickbats" and participating in what he refers to as "culture-war skirmishes," young conservative students should concentrate on educating themselves in Western culture. As I told them,**

You've got a whole lifetime to keep up with the state of the culture war or to be a political activist. But you've only got one chance at growing into an actually educated American citizen, a full-fledged participant in our cultural heritage, a torchbearer for Western civilization. Hundreds of young people committed to defending America or preserving Western culture aren't going to be able to accomplish those goals if there are no young people still getting the kind of education that used to turn students into educated Americans and real citizens of the West.

The main point of the speech was that the culture-war-and-brickbats aspect of conservatism needs--at least during their formative years--to take a back seat to students' actual initiation into Western culture:

You should be reading Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare--Dickens and T. S. Eliot--the "dead white males" who used to make up the old "canon" of literature that every educated person needed to know. Even conservative classics--take Whittaker Chambers' Witness, or God and Man at Yale--aren't going to give you Western culture. They're only going to convince you why it's worth conserving, and set you a fine example of how to defend it. You can learn from the greats of American conservatism that there are permanent things, and that they need preserving. But the best place to learn the permanent things themselves is not from reading the classics of conservative thought. It's from reading the classics, period.

From there I went on to talk up English literature as intrinsically great, to criticize PC English professors for teaching "Marx, Foucault, or Derrida, or the history of ballet" instead, and to explore a few things you might learn if you studied English literature, instead of the those subjects:

• from Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Shakespeare's Henry V, and Evelyn Waugh--to admire heroes, and appreciate that war is sometimes necessary, and even noble

• from Milton and many other greats of English lit.--that Christianity is intellectually respectable

• from Chaucer--all about chivalry, the uniquely Western arrangement between the sexes

• from Dickens and our other great novelists--about what's wrong with leftist morality: that the end doesn't justify the means; that it's wrong to do evil that good may come of it (because good and bad actions have their own internal logic); and that revolutionary expedience brings on terror.

Presumably, these are among the "object lessons in conservative values" that Tower thinks I want students mining for. The fact is, you don't have to dig hard to find this stuff in the classics of English and American literature. These ideas seem alien--peculiarly conservative--only to folks who are cut off from the traditional wisdom of the West. It's only from a position outside that tradition that these ideas seem like "conservative object lessons."

I'd call them basic principles of Western civilization--in a couple of cases, basic requirements of anything worthy of the name "civilization" at all.

Of course, an increasing number of Americans are entirely alienated from such essential elements of our traditional culture. After just a couple more generations of college students educated in Marx, postmodernism, and deconstruction instead of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, these ideas may be largely forgotten.

So I guess maybe it is up to us bizarre, bunny-killing, radical right-wingers (with our candy-dish head bones and our uncurtained happy teeth) to preserve Western civilization, after all.

We'll do our best.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

*Apparently the article's not yet available online; I'll link to it when it is.

**I don't have access to a tape or transcript of that talk. (I'm not sure whether one was made.) But I know I didn't deviate from the speech I wrote to the extent of saying the exact opposite.

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Click here for an exclusive Human Events Q&A session in which H.W. Crocker III discusses the subject of his new release, Don't Tread on Me. In this his latest, Crocker debunks the most commonly held historical myths regarding the American Military. He boldly tackles such falsehoods as the notion that the Southern Confederacy was misguided in its goals, that America has always been a non-imperial force, and that the Iraq war has been a disaster.

--Megan Hale, Associate Editor

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Robert Spencer, author of The Truth About Muhammad will be appearing on CNN's Headline News with Glenn Beck TONIGHT at 7:00 pm ET (to be replayed at 9:00 ET and midnight ET.)

TUNE IN!

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Conjugal America is the title of one of our new selections -- the latest installment in Allan Carlson's multi-book campaign (including also The American Way and Fractured Generations) to wake us up to the value of the traditional family, to its accelerating dissolution, and to the role government interference is playing in that catastrophe.

Coincidentally, within a month of the publication of Conjugal America, it was reported that married households now make up a minority of households in the U.S. Here's the Los Angeles Times being cute about the news:

Still, news of the "married minority" was tossed around the media this week like rice at a wedding, causing singles to revel in demographic triumph and certain conservative groups to fret about the deterrent effect of high divorce rates and the possibility that traditional families may become an endangered species. But the numbers may say more about when we marry, and for how long, than they do about whether we'll ever walk down the aisle. The average age for first marriages is now estimated to be around 27 for men and 25 for women. As for the average length of marriages, some reports put it as low as eight years. That leaves us a long time to not be married, even if we wed repeatedly.

It's possible, however, that marriage's new underdog status may be just the image makeover it needed. Now that it's no longer the default setting for the American dream, young people who once dismissed wedlock as bourgeois might find themselves strangely drawn to it. Marriage is going from mainstream to just a tiny bit alternative -- and maybe that's not such a bad thing. In a country of 300 million, people will want to express their individuality more than ever. As it turns out, getting married may be just the ticket -- it beats tattoos.

The news that the length of the average marriage may be as low as eight years is yet another horrifying fact. A recent press release from the good folks at the Population Research Institute pointed out that a substantial proportion of our suburban sprawl can be blamed not on population growth, but 1) on divorce -- which means couples who used to need one house now need two and 2) on the increasing size of our houses.

The amount of space we feel we need just seems to keep growing. Not only do couples have trouble staying in one house together. In families that still live in the same house, husbands, wives, and children all want more space between them. And, as Mark Steyn points out in America Alone, lots of Americans -- but even more Europeans -- are choosing not to encumber themselves with children in the first place. After all, the U.S. population topped 300 million last week (that was the other demographic story in the news) because of immigration, not because we're reproducing ourselves.

All of which puts me in mind of C. S. Lewis's allegory of hell as a vast, dingy city with only one or two occupied houses per block. The residents keep quarrelling and moving farther away from each other, until it would take a journey of many years even to visit a long-damned soul such as Napoleon (who, when you got to where you could see what he was doing, would turn out to be pacing back and forth, incessantly blaming one person after another for his defeat).

"Family values" is a vague phrase with more than a touch of spin to it. At worst, it can be a euphemism -- a way to talk about differences of principle without being willing to state those differences forthrightly or to argue for those principles openly. But there's some truth in the phrase, too. The fact is, living in a family requires (and teaches) a degree of self-control, responsibility, self-sacrifice, prudence, and humility that -- very unfortunately -- fewer Americans are now able to muster.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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Just a quick note about our new Dual Main Selection.

One of the books is my own Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, which Jeffrey Rubin graciously selected for the Club before I took over as editor; you can see my defense of why literature is a conservative issue here.

The other book is Gregg Jackson's Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, whose brisk sales are already justifying our faith in it. It's rare that we select a self-published book for the Club, and it almost never happens that we make a self-published book a Main Selection. But this exception to that rule is a wonderful resource. It's exactly what you need at your elbow this Christmas when you're debating that friend or relative whom you hope to see during the holidays, of whom you're very fond, but with whom you've been sparring over politics for years (a cousin of my own will immediately recognize herself if she reads this). It supplies the facts, statistics, and citations you need to demolish all those stubborn liberal myths.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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As promised, the ConservativeBookNotes Q&A with Robert Spencer on his just published The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion. . Spencer is the bestselling author of numerous books about Islam and the director of Jihad Watch. Not just because publishing a warts-and-all biography of Muhammad is (literally) a death-defying feat, but because of the value of the little-known facts he brings to light, Spencer deserves our attention.

You're now the author of several books about Islam. Did your research for The Truth about Muhammad turn up anything new? If readers have already bought The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and tens of thousands of them have), why do should they read this book?

This book differs markedly from The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and my other books in that, instead of focusing on aspects of Islamic history and theology and their use by contemporary mujahedin, it concentrates on the figure of Muhammad himself. In Islamic tradition Muhammad is al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man, and uswa hasana, an excellent model of conduct (Qur'an 33:21). Accordingly it is extraordinarily important for non-Muslims in this age of global jihad violence to understand who Muhammad was and what he taught. So in this new book I explore the earliest Islamic sources about Muhammad in order to illuminate what pious Muslims learn about him, and show how jihadists today invoke his words and deeds to justify their actions.

So what kind of a person was Muhammad?

Muhammad was by all accounts a strong and compelling personality, who inspired magnificent loyalty in those who were close to him. His personal kindness and even gentleness are remembered in glowing terms by some of his closest companions. At the same time, however, he was a warrior who assured his followers that the supreme god, Allah, would reward them if they fought for him. He didn't just fight in self-defense, but he initiated conflicts, gave instructions for the division of the spoils of war, and fought in many of those battles himself. For Muhammad the political and religious were virtually synonymous: Allah would reward obedience to him in this world with military victory and political power, and he ruled according to laws that he represented as having been revealed by Allah.

How have Muhammad's character and the events of his life shaped Islam as we know it today?

In innumerable ways. Most notoriously, of course, in violence. Muhammad commanded his followers to offer non-Muslims conversion to Islam, subjugation as inferiors within the Islamic social order, or war (cf. Sahih Muslim 4294). We have recently seen Al-Qaeda's Adam Gadahn and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran extend the invitation to Islam; Gadahn to all Americans and Ahmadinejad to George W. Bush. We should understand that the follow-up to such invitations, in accord with the example of the perfect man, is violence. Moreover, jihad warriors around the world invoke his example. The late Zarqawi exhorted his followers several years ago in these terms: "Is it not time for you to take the path of jihad and carry the sword of the Prophet of prophets?...The Prophet, the most merciful, ordered [his army] to strike the necks of some prisoners in [the battle of] Badr and to kill them. . . . And he set a good example for us." This kind of statement is common.

Muhammad also has left his mark on Islamic culture in numerous ways: his notorious marriage to the nine-year-old Aisha led the Ayatollah Khomeini to lower the marriageable age of girls in Iran to nine, in imitation of Muhammad's example. Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old when he was 28. Child marriage is common throughout the Islamic world: aid workers entering Afghan refugee camps in 2002 found that half the second-grade-age girls in those camps were already married.

Meanwhile, false accusations against Aisha brought about the Islamic legal requirement that four male Muslim witnesses must be produced in order to establish a crime of adultery or related indiscretions. In cases of sexual misbehavior, four male witnesses are required to establish the deed-in accord with a revelation that came to Muhammad to exonerate his youthful wife (Qur'an 24:13). And just as Aisha's own word counted for nothing to establish the falsity of the accusations against her, so to this day Islamic law restricts the validity of a woman's testimony - particular in cases involving sexual immorality. Says the Qur'an: "Call in two male witnesses from among you, but if two men cannot be found, then one man and two women whom you judge fit to act as witnesses; so that if either of them commit an error, the other will remember" (2:282).

Consequently, it is even today virtually impossible to prove rape in lands that follow the dictates of Islamic law. If a woman accuses a man of rape, she may end up incriminating herself: if the required male witnesses can't be found, the victim's charge of rape becomes an admission of adultery. That accounts for the grim fact that, according to the Islamic reformist group Sisters in Islam, as many as seventy-five percent of the women in prison in Pakistan are, in fact, behind bars for the crime of being a victim of rape. Several high- profile cases in Nigeria recently have also revolved around rape accusations being turned around by Islamic authorities into charges of fornication, resulting in death sentences that were only modified after international pressure.

Moreover, such abuses are extraordinarily resistant to criticism and reform-they are, after all, based on the example of the Prophet, the perfect model for human behavior.

Okay, so Muhammad lived in a really primitive culture, an awfully long time ago; and maybe he had some pretty serious character flaws. But an unsympathetic student of Christianity or Judaism could argue the same about the Old Testament patriarchs. Look at Abraham: He engaged in some dubious behavior when the pharoah of Egypt took an interest in his wife, he fathered a son on a slave woman and then drove both mother and child out into the desert, and he came this close to human sacrifice. Don't all religions have this stuff in their traditions? What makes Islam any different?

Even if material from the Old Testament or New Testament were equivalent to the material in the Qur'an and Islamic tradition that I have briefly sketched above, Islam is still completely different -- because Muhammad's exalted status as the Perfect Man flattens historical distinctions and ignores historical development, elevating this seventh-century leader to a role as model for twenty-first century people. No Jews or Christians look to Abraham or any of the other patriarchs in a comparable way.

Even if Muhammad's example is particularly dangerous, isn't indicting his character the exactly wrong tactic to take? Why shouldn't we Americans, Westerners, and Christians downplay the negative features of Islam, and emphasize what Muslims have in common with us? Isn't it smart (even if it may be something of a stretch) for President Bush to keep insisting that Islam is a religion of peace? Surely we can't afford a war with the whole Muslim world?

This is, of course, a widespread view, but I couldn't disagree with it more strongly. In the first place, our ignoring or downplaying the elements of Muhammad's character that inspire violence and fanaticism won't do a thing to prevent Islamic jihadists from invoking those very same elements of his character in order to justify their actions among their fellow Muslims, and even to gain recruits. The general ignorance of Americans about the teachings of Islam and the life of Muhammad may mislead some analysts into believing that the unsavory facts about Muhammad's words and deeds are a closely guarded secret, when in fact the material in my book is all common knowledge in the Islamic world. The only difference between my book and a book written by a pious Muslim about Muhammad is not the events we discuss, but the fact that I subject Muhammad to a moral standard that is different from the one he delineated for himself. As I show in the book, mujahedin refer to these words and deeds more or less on a routine basis.

Thus the only fruit of our declining to discuss these issues will not be a strengthening of Islamic moderates, but just the opposite. In this book I have set forth elements of Muhammad's example that need reevaluation by those who think of him as the Perfect Man. Muslim reformers can have no success unless they dare to discuss forthrightly the elements of Islam that need reform. Pretending that there are no such elements only cuts the ground out from under these reformers.

Finally, those who think that speaking forthrightly about the elements of Islam that encourage violence will lead to war with the entire Islamic world have never explained why this must be so. Are we then to believe that President Bush's claim that Islam is a religion of peace is what is keeping the peace between the U.S. and most of the Islamic countries in the world? It is much more likely that that peace, such as it is, is being preserved by complexes of prudence and self-interest. Will all that be overthrown if the President said forthrightly that we are fighting a defensive action against an Islamic jihad, and that any state that supports that jihad will receive no more American aid? Is it certain that in that case every one of our putative Muslim allies would choose the jihad over the aid, even in the short term?

If Muhammad is, as you suggest, a person very unlike Jesus, or even the Buddha, why is he so admired? Isn't Islam the fast-growing world religion? Why does it appeal to so many people?

In a certain sense he is admired because Muslims are taught that he is admirable. Once it is taught that he is the Perfect Man whose example must be followed, it follows that everything he did must have been right. The elements of his life and career that scandalize non-Muslims do not, therefore, have a similar effect on Muslims. After all, it is he who is the standard; there is no standard above him.

Islam is growing quickly, but this is largely due to demographics. Polygamous societies tend to have high rates of population growth. However, there is no doubt that Islam has definite appeal to Westerners who, sick of relativism and materialism and often unable to find a respite from it in Western religious traditions as they currently present themselves in America and Europe, turn to Islam admiring its absolutism and unwillingness to compromise. There are also concerted efforts to spread Islam in America's prison, where jihadist recruiters can capitalize upon the alienation from Western society that the prisoners may already feel, and channel it into the jihad against the West.

And why are Muslims willing to go to such lengths--killing themselves, murdering other people, living in sleeper cells for years so they can pull off acts of terrorism--for Islam?

Because Allah has promised them rewards in this life and the next if they do. I think it is sometimes difficult for Americans, even religious Americans, to understand the depth and power of a religious appeal. Allah promises Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for him (Qur'an 9:111). A suicide bomber may thus reflect that, after all, he is going to die one day anyway, but if he dies in this way, Paradise is guaranteed to him. Secularists may sneer, but this is in fact an extraordinarily powerful appeal.

Do you have a theory about why the liberals in Europe and our own blue states seem completely blase about the increasing influence of a religion that's so hostile to their own interests and stated goals (especially on the status of women)? Why are we seeing lefty Canadians and Europeans making accommodations to sharia law?

The jihad aims to establish an earthly polity in which justice is established by force, with draconian punishments for those who do not fall into line. The resemblance to the earthly utopia of the Marxists is unmistakable, and I do not doubt that this is an important reason why -- but not the only reason why -- so many Leftists see kindred spirits in the mujahedin. Another reason arises from the Left's now long-standing habit of standing on the other side of any cause in which the United States is fighting.

You've been writing about Islam since soon after 9/11, and your JihadWatch website follows Islamist violence around the world very closely. Are things getting any better, at all? Have moderate Muslim voices begun to emerge? Are we succeeding in containing the violence?

No to all three questions, although there are some quite courageous moderate Muslim individuals. Generally, I am seeing increasingly that the failure to come to grips with the realities of Islam and the example of Muhammad have led to numerous disastrous policy errors. If, for example, the U.S. called the governments of Egypt and Pakistan to account for the elements within those governments that are aiding the jihad against us, and made eradication of those elements and concrete steps against the jihad ideology a condition for further U.S. aid, we would either save some money or gain some more reliable allies.

After the Danish Cartoon riots and the Pope Rage incident, why on earth would you write a book that Muslims are sure to say insults their Prophet? Why keep sticking your neck out like this?

I am aware of the risks, and have received several new death threats just since this book came out. But I do not personally wish to be a person who gives in to violent intimidation, and I don't want to live in a society that does so either. The issues I raise in this book ought to be part of the American public debate, for the sake of our future. If we decline to discuss them now, we are already submitting to one significant aspect of the Islamic norms for behavior that Osama bin Laden and his ilk so dearly want to impose upon us.

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We hope to have a Q&A with The Truth about Muhammad author Robert Spencer up tomorrow. Meanwhile, check out Diana West's piece in The Washington Times.

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Amanda Carpenter, author of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s Dossier on Hillary Clinton , will be appearing on FOX NEWS' Big Story with John Gibson TONIGHT at 5:20PM to discuss her book!!

DON'T MISS IT!

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Be sure to catch Bill Bennett, author of America: The Last Best Hope, when he appears on the nationally syndicated James Dobson Show TODAY and TOMORROW.

TUNE IN!

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Click here for an article by Thomas Kuiper, author of I've always been a Yankees Fan, for an inside look at Senator Clinton's calculating fundraising tactics and shameless greed.

And don't miss this revealing interview with Mark Steyn, in which the author of America Alone discusses the rapid expansion of muslim culture throughout Europe.

--Megan Hale, Associate Editor

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A week or two ago I was complaining about the sorry state of children's publishing. Now we at the Club are (thanks to Sophia Institute Press) doing something about it. The Book of Saints and Heroes, newly arrived in our warehouse, is the perfect antidote to contemporary children's literature, with its dreary realism and uninspiring substitutes (tolerance, diversity, self-esteem, and so forth) for real virtues (loyalty, pity, courage, and the rest).

The stories in The Book of Saints and Heroes were collected by Andrew Lang and his wife. Lang's the man who put together The Blue Fairy Book and a dozen more different-colored collections of fairy and folk tales that were a part of the classic literature of childhood for most of the twentieth century.

In the past few decades such stories have been largely replaced by books written expressly to help readers navigate the stresses of modern childhood and adolescence. Today's boys and girls read stories about divorce and substance abuse, not about and princesses and heroes.

Consider Lang's description of what you'll find in the stories he collected: "immortal examples of courage, patience, kindness, courtesy, and piety toward God and man." Could anything be more alien the milieu of "Heather Has Two Mommies" and "Daddy's Roommate"--or even of some less controversial but similarly conceived story in which Heather learns to cope with with her step-siblings or makes friends with someone "different" at school?

So are Lang's stories--are fairy tales in general--"escapist" literature that has nothing to do with the real world?

Far from it. As a matter of fact, courage is as real as divorce. Courtesy, just like substance abuse, happens in the world we live in.

It's just that we're not used to thinking about patience and courtesy and kindness* and the other virtues--we think and talk about them even less than we do about knights and princesses.

How did we let that happen? And what is it doing to our children and grandchildren, growing up without being taught to aspire to those virtues?

If that question worries you as it worries me, consider buying Lang's book for a child you care about.

Let me leave you with a G.K. Chesterton quotation on this subject, courtesy of The Dawn Patrol:

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

* Just think how much richer an idea kindness is than tolerance.

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Amanda Carpenter, author of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy's Dossier on Hillary Rodham Clinton, will appear on FOX NEW's Live Desk with Martha McCallum at 1:30PM TODAY!!

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Click here for a pointed Q&A session between Mark Steyn, author of America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, and NRO editor Kathryn Lopez.

Here Steyn discusses his riveting new book, and covers such topics as current mid-east relations with the west, the threat from nuclear-armed rogue states and the American political scene.

--Megan Hale, Associate Editor

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What with one thing and another--the long, slow breakup of the old Cold War conservative alliance, recent Republican electoral victories (and resulting coziness with the culture of Washington), stresses arising out of the war we're in--there's a tug-of-war now going on over who owns, and gets to define, conservatism.

I don't propose to hazard a definition myself, at least not just now. But I would like to point out what I think is a flaw in one proposed understanding of conservatism. There's a definition of conservatism that's been popping up in quite disparate places, lately: in Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul, but also in the Pat Buchanan-founded American Conservative magazine.

This understanding, as I understand it, is that conservatism is simply the opposite of ideology.

Sullivan appeals to Michael Oakeshott in support of this thesis; Jeffrey Hart, in this American Conservative piece, appeals to Edmund Burke. It's easier for me to address Hart's than Sullivan's version of this argument, partly because it's in a short article, and partly because I know a heck of a lot more about Burke than I do about Oakeshott. Hart appeals to Burke as the anti-ideologue who opposed the French Revolution's attack on the practical wisdom of tradition and custom. Here's Hart's most extended example of what he sees as ideology in contemporary politics:

In economics (supply-side dogma, calamitous debt), in science (Intelligent Design), in his opposition to stem-cell research and therapy, Bush has been a brass-bound ideologue. On stem-cell research, Bush formulates his opposition this way: "It’s wrong to destroy life in order to save life." His first use of the word "life" refers to a few insensate cells, his second to an actual sick human being. His formulation is self-refuting. As an exercise in the use of the "moral imagination"--a term coined by Burke--let us cut through verbiage to concrete fact: if you had a child with Type I diabetes, a devastating disease, and I said I had a few cells that would cure her, would you turn this offer down? The question answers itself. It also answers Bush.

Ramesh Ponnuru's Party of Death is the place to go for the substantive answer to this argument for embryonic stem cell research. Here, I'd like to discuss two more general questions.

First, would traditional conservatives--would Burke, for example--really see Bush's argument that it's wrong to kill microscopic human beings to help children we already know and love as an example of the kind of "ideology" that conservatives abhorred in the French Revolution?

It would seem not. Here's a convincing argument that Burke's preference for the practical and customary over the theoretical and universal did not amount to a rejection of universal moral principles. In his argument for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, for example, Burke argued explicitly that "the laws of morality are the same everywhere." My bet is that Burke would think the folks pushing embryonic stem cell research (not the folks pointing out that the deliberate killing of innocent human beings--however small--is always and everywhere murder, and murder is still wrong) were more like French Revolutionaries: like those ideologues, the stem cell enthusiasts are willing to jettison traditional morality in their pursuit of a wonderfully improved (but possibly imaginary) future.

Second, how does this version of conservatism--conservatism understood simply as the rejection of ideology, and ideology understood to include any absolute principle, up to and including the absolutes of traditional morality--differ from simple moral relativism?

Now, "relativism" is usually more a term of abuse than a precise description. And "absolutism" sounds equally insulting. Nobody really wants to be accused of one or the other.

But isn't it impossible, in fact, not to be one or the other--an absolutist or a relativist? Either you believe that some principles--for example, that murder is always wrong, no matter how good the reason--are always true, or else you don't: You see every truth and moral requirement as dependent on circumstances, as negotiable, as applying sometimes and not other times.

Hart's entirely right that many parents, faced with the dilemma he describes, would sacrifice the embryo for their own child. That's exactly what moral principles are good for: to tell people when they have to constrain their instincts and their desires and their hopes--even their desires and hopes for very good things for themselves and their own--out of, for example, respect for the absolute rights of other people. It's only if moral principles are recognized to be absolute that they're an effective check on ideology.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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WARNING: This post will be an impatient rant against conservative impatience.

Okay, guys. We need to stay the course--and I'm not talking about Iraq.

The conventional wisdom is that Republicans are going to lose the 2008 midterm election because of the Foley scandal. Social conservatives in particular, it's being said, will stay home on election day rather than go to the polls to support the Republicans who have allowed the House of Representatives to be tainted by a sordid sexual scandal--or even vote Democrat.

For any social conservative who's feeling this way, I have one question: Have you completely lost your marbles?

Look, it would be hard to get more socially conservative than I am. I'd be perfectly happy with laws against emailing sexual content to anyone you're not actually married to, let alone to teenaged boys who assist you in your job as a U.S. legislator. I'm in a practically perpetual snit about the mainstreaming of porn and the declining standards of morality in America.

But the voting booth is not the place to indulge your temper, or to idly and carelessly "send a message" that you're frustrated about everything in general, or one irrelevant thing in particular. Your vote is your chance to change the government, not to express yourself.

I myself am a resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia. For Senator, I get to vote for George Allen, a man who irritates me in many ways. In particular, and in this very Senate race, he's annoyed me no end by attempting to scare voters off his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, by painting Webb as insufficiently enthusiastic about women in the military.

Now, you can't be sufficiently insufficiently enthusiastic about female soldiers for me. If I were in charge, I'd immediately purge all the military services of women--except maybe for a Florence Nightingale Navy Nurse's Corps, or some such. I think it's a warning sign of the death of Western civilization that we're sending the mothers of toddlers to fight in our wars.

But am I going to hesitate for one second to vote for George Allen? No, I am not.

Why? Because I know that while the Republican Party is infected with the rot that's destroying our society, the Democratic Party is the Societal Rot Fan Club.

Do we--to take just one very important example--really want a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade? After more than three decades of disappointments, we've finally got a President who will appoint that kind of Court, and a Senate that will confirm the justices he appoints. Let's not quit when we're in sight of the finish line.

Are we serious? Are we going to change the government, and the culture, and the country? Are we--this is the real question--going to act like citizens capable of self-government, or like disappointed children?

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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There's a great new piece by Don't Tread on Me author H. W. Crocker III up at The American Spectator this morning.

Crocker's thesis is that we need to imitate the civilizational confidence of the British Empire--and recover America's own traditional "Don't Tread on Me" attitude--in order to manage Islamist threat:

The key to [British success] was that while the British were happy to leave traditional arrangements (tribal leaders, religious affiliations, and so on) standing, they insisted that Muslims accommodate themselves to British law, custom, government, and civilization.

The pressure today, after the collapse of the European empires and the not coincidental rise of moral relativism and multiculturalism, is the reverse. Danish cartoonists, German operatic productions, the pope, and European law and foreign policy are expected to accommodate militant Islam. Militant Islam is not expected to accommodate the West--even when the Islamists live in London or Berlin or Paris--because the West lacks confidence that it has a civilization worth promoting over, or even defending against, the Islamists.

Crocker makes a surprisingly good case (with astonishing quotations from the Founders) that America is naturally imperial, and gives some damning examples of the harm American anti-imperialism has done.

You may not buy into the American Empire ideal lock, stock, and barrel. But you have to admit that the loss of confidence in our civilization that Crocker points to is something that has to be addressed for any solution to the threat of radical Islam to be workable. And just reading Crocker is a step in that direction--his prose, is a kind of booster shot of "Don't Tread on Me" American patriotism.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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Former Club editor (and present Club author) H. W. Crocker III has sent me one more piece of evidence that our universities are well into a decline they're unlikely to recover from. In a devastating article for National Review, John Miller documents the end of military history in our university history departments. You'll never guess what they're teaching instead:

Social history has started to infiltrate military history, Trojan Horse–style. Rather than examining battles, leaders, and weapons, it looks at the impact of war upon culture. And so classes that are supposedly about the Second World War blow by the Blitzkrieg, the Bismarck, and the Bulge in order to celebrate the proto-feminism of Rosie the Riveter, condemn the national disgrace of Japanese-American internment, and ask that favorite faculty-lounge head-scratcher: Should the United States have dropped the bomb? "It’s becoming harder and harder to find experts in operational military history," says Dennis Showalter of Colorado College. "All this social history is like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark."

Consider the case of Steve Zdatny, a history professor at West Virginia University. On his webpage, he lists World War I as one of his "teaching fields." But he’s no expert in trench warfare or aerial dogfights. Here’s how he describes his latest scholarship: "Having recently finished a history of the French hairdressing profession . . . I am now in the opening stages of research on a history of public and personal hygiene, which will examine evolving practices and sensibilities of cleanliness in twentieth-century France." His body of work includes journal articles with titles such as "The Boyish Look and the Liberated Woman: The Politics and Aesthetics of Women’s Hairstyles."

It looks like anybody still interested in how wars have actually been is going to have to educate himself on that subject. Which is where Crocker's Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting. It's a hilariously politically incorrect book, but it's also great for filling in those gaps in your basic knowledge of American military history.

Maybe it's because I went to a girls' school, where our history classes tended to skip over all the battles (in those days we could trust the boys at the boys' schools were learning that stuff), but I never have been entirely clear on why the British "ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles / And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go / They ran so fast, the hounds couldn't catch 'em, / On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico," and I've always been a bit fuzzy on what exactly the Marines were up to in the hall of Montezuma and on the shores of Tripoli. Now that even the boys are learning about hairstyles in school (something, I have to say, that even we girls used to confine our study of to our leisure hours), there must be an awful lot of folks who could stand to learn some basic military history from Crocker.

Miller quotes Williamson Murray, a former professor, explaining the current attitude in university history departments: "The prevailing view is that war is bad and we shouldn’t study bad things." But as one of J. R. R. Tolkien's characters points out, it doesn't take two foes to breed a war. Beating our swords into hairdresser's scissors simply isn't safe under the ante-millenarian conditions we're actually living in.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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Comments: Hilarious and spot-on. 10/5/2006 4:23 PM

Comments:
Dear Ms. Kantor:
John J. Miller is a jerk and there is nothing "devastating" about his article. In particular, he takes me to task for teaching "soft" military history, when, in fact, he knows nothing about the way I teach World War I. There is quite a lot of good military history being taught and written about France during World War I, as Mr. Miller would have discovered, had he done real research instead of simply talking to people who share his prejudices.
yours,
Steve Zdatny
Professor of History
West Virginia University
10/11/2006 9:21 AM

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I've been in and out of meetings all day and won't have time for much of a post. But I would like to direct your attention to JihadWatch where you can read about the various death threats that Robert Spencer and the Pope -- two of my favorite people, I highly recommend you regularly read them both, if you don't already -- are collecting from various adherents of the Religion of Peace.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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Just a plug for one of our new titles--a book that's got important information for parents, and that's selling surprisingly well for a book of its kind. Meg Meeker's Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters is a powerful warning about what growing up is like for girls today--the dating scene (insofar as it can even be described as dating any more) is more horrific than the thankfully clueless over-30s among us can imagine. But Meeker's book isn't just another expose of the horrible places the sexual revolution has brought our children. It's also a very practical manual that will show you how you can be the kind of father your daughter needs, the kind of father who will teach your daughter to navigate the temptations and pitfalls of 21st-century adolescence.

For decades, feminists have been telling men that women need more space and freedom, that men need to be less interfering and authoritative. But daughters need authoritative, involved, even--when necessary (and it's quite often necessary)--interfering fathers. The "patriarchy" that the feminists are always blaming for female misery is, in fact, a source of security for girls and a fount of long-term happiness for women who are lucky enough to have strong fathers.

--Elizabeth Kantor, Editor

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Comments: What a wonderful gift to a brand new father of a darling baby girl. --M.A. Mason, 2615 N. Causeway Blvd., Apt G138, Mandrville, La-70471 10/9/2006 3:14 PM

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