Maggie's Farm

Reposted from June, 2005:

Music without Magic

That's the title of Hoffman's piece in the Wilson Quarterly. It mainly addresses the psychological effects of art music and the failure of much 20th Century art music to gain an audience. A quote:

But just how does our gracious Art exercise these powers? How does it comfort us, charm us, kindle our hearts? We might start our search for answers by positing two fundamentals: a fundamental pain and a fundamental quest. A fundamental pain of our human condition is loneliness. No surprise here: We’re born alone, we’re alone in our consciousness, we die alone, and, when loved ones die, we’re left alone. And pain itself, including physical pain, isolates us and makes us feel still more alone, completing a vicious circle. Our fundamental quest—by no means unrelated to our aloneness and our loneliness—is the quest for meaning, the quest to make sense of our time on earth, to make sense of time itself.

Where does music come in? Music is both a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning—meaning in time and meaning for time. The first thing music does is banish silence. Silence is at once a metaphor for loneliness and the thing itself: It’s a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence, replaces it. It provides us with a companion by occupying our senses—and, through our senses, our minds, our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. We know that sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us move: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, therefore, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us. 

Read entire here, and if you have the time, read the erudite comments posted below the article.

As you can see, we are reposting some of our favorite essays we have collected over the past 18 months - none written by us.

In the deep summer, we like to recycle stuff. Yes, that is Cape Cod. Can you name that light?

Why I Became a Conservative, by (the great) Roger Scruton; it begins like this:

I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.

In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a barricade against the next van-load of policemen.

The van—known then as a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh that covered its windows—came cautiously round the corner from the Rue Descartes, jerked to a halt, and disgorged a score of frightened policemen. They were greeted by flying cobble-stones and several of them fell. One rolled over on the ground clutching his face, from which the blood streamed through tightly clenched fingers. There was an exultant shout, the injured policeman was helped into the van, and the students ran off down a side-street, sneering at the cochons and throwing Parthian cobbles as they went.

Read it all.

Reposted from May, 2005:

Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals, with an essay: Re-Taking the University

Samples:

"Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules but is not entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.” It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste hold sway. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.” A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals: “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”  "

and:

"Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and asked often."

Read entire.

TRILLING WAS RESPONDING to the problem George Orwell had posed so dramatically in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Reviewing that book when it appeared in 1949, Trilling made clear that Orwell was not, as liberals liked to think, merely attacking Soviet communism. "He is saying, indeed, something no less comprehensive than this: that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture." A few years later, reviewing another book by Orwell, Trilling repeated this theme: "Social idealism" is not the only thing that can be perverted into tyranny; so can any idea "unconditioned" by reality. "The essential point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is just this, the danger of the ultimate and absolute power which the mind can develop when it frees itself from conditions, from the bondage of things and history."

A repost from Feb, 2005:

From a piece by Gelertner in Daily Standard:

Benjamin Disraeli--twice prime minister of Great Britain, romantic novelist, inventor of modern conservatism--was a neocon in the plain sense of the word, a "new conservative" who began his career on the left. Conservative thinking dates to the dawn of organized society, but modern conservatism--a mass movement, a philosophy not for aristocrats and the rich but for everybody--was Disraeli's creation. That modern conservatism should have been invented by a 19th-century neocon is thought provoking. More surprising: His redefinition of conservatism is still fresh, and his political philosophy has never been more apt.

Conservatism is the most powerful and electric force in the American intellectual landscape. Young people no longer discover the left and get excited; they are far more likely to get their intellectual kicks discovering and experimenting with conservatism. But what exactly do conservatives believe? How do they resolve the seeming paradox that so many conservatives revere the past yet are also progressives, determined to move this nation forward and let it grow, stretch, and inhabit more and more of its own best self? Disraeli produced a definition of conservatism that resolves the problem. It is so terse and compelling, it ranks as a milestone of political thought.

He was a statesman who remodeled Europe and a thinker who examined some of the hardest of all political, social, and philosophical questions: How should democratic government work, what does party politics mean, where do the Jews fit in? I too "would lift up my voice to heaven, and ask," says the hero of his novel Tancred, "What is DUTY, and what is FAITH? What ought I to DO, and what ought I to BELIEVE?" On these and related questions, Disraeli said fantastically improbable things that would be easy to dismiss except that many of them are true.

Read the whole thing.

Who's afraid of economic growth?

Daniel Ben-Ami has written what I believe is a very important essay on Spiked on the anti-growth and limited-growth movement which is so much in evidence amongs environmentalists, the intelligentsia, and the leftist-minded these days.

My own main problem with the anti-growth movement is that it contains, I believe, a latent fascism. There is an assumption that someone other than me ought to determine how I chose to live my life, and that they (the anti-growth folks) are the ones to do it.

From his intro:

The aim of this essay is to examine how cynicism about growth has become a central element of contemporary anti-humanism. It will examine the indirect forms that growth scepticism takes while pointing out its link to environmentalism. It will then consider how anti-growth thinking has moved from being an elite middle-class phenomenon to an idea widely held throughout society. A key factor in this shift was the capitulation of the left to environmentalist and anti-growth thinking from the 1970s onwards. The slowdown in economic growth over the same period, which in turn helped undermine the legitimacy of the market, was also important.

another:

...mainstream politicians and thinkers have maintained a formal attachment to economic growth despite any reservations they may express. A direct attack on growth would be almost unthinkable. If they argued explicitly for a levelling off of living standards, let alone their decline, it is hard to see how they could maintain popular support. This tension - between formal support for growth while expressing doubts about its benefits - is particularly worth exploring. It provides an opening for a restatement of the need for economic growth as part of a broader development of a new humanism.

Please read the whole thing. It is excellent brain food.

The frazzled Left would like to limit your free political speech, as was clear from Stalin's quote which we quoted in QQQ last week. Now that we no longer have a monolithic leftist media, they are getting very upset about diversity of ideas. However, the Left historically likes to limit available viewpoints. Bad idea, for a country full of thinking, imaginative people. Important piece by Anderson in Opinion Journal. Quotes:

The irony of campaign-finance reform is that the "corruption" it targets seems not to exist in any widespread sense. Studies galore have found little or no significant influence of campaign contributions on legislators' votes. Ideological commitments, party positions and constituents' wishes are what motivate the typical politician's actions in office. Aha! reformers will often riposte, the corruption is hidden, determining what Congress doesn't do--like enacting big gas taxes. But as Mr. Will notes, "that charge is impossible to refute by disproving a negative." Even so, such conspiracy-theory thinking is transforming election law into what journalist Jonathan Rauch calls "an engine of unlimited political regulation."

Uh huh. Yup.

McCain-Feingold, the latest and scariest step down that slope, makes it a felony for corporations, nonprofit advocacy groups and labor unions to run ads that criticize--or even name or show--members of Congress within 60 days of a federal election, when such quintessentially political speech might actually persuade voters. It forbids political parties from soliciting or spending "soft money" contributions to publicize the principles and ideas they stand for. Amending the already baffling campaign-finance rules from the 1970s, McCain-Feingold's dizzying do's and don'ts, its detailed and onerous reporting requirements of funding sources--which require a dense 300-page book to lay out--have made running for office, contributing to a candidate or cause, or advocating without an attorney at hand unwise and potentially ruinous.

McCain wanted the goody-goody independent image. This is the price we pay for his goo-goo image. 

Not for nothing has Justice Clarence Thomas denounced McCain-Feingold's "unprecedented restrictions" as an "assault on the free exchange of ideas."

For sure. The man speaks the truth.

Campaign-finance reform has a squeaky-clean image, but the dirty truth is that this speech-throttling legislation is partly the result of a hoax perpetrated by a handful of liberal foundations, led by the venerable Pew Charitable Trusts. New York Post reporter Ryan Sager exposed the scam when he got hold of a 2004 videotape of former Pew official Sean Treglia telling a roomful of journalists and professors how Pew and other foundations spent years bankrolling various experts, ostensibly independent nonprofits (including the Center for Public Integrity and Democracy 21), and media outlets (NPR got $1.2 million for "news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making")--all aimed at fooling Washington into thinking that Americans were clamoring for reform, when in truth there was little public pressure to "clean up the system." "The target group for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," said Mr. Treglia matter-of-factly, referring to Congress. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot--that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

That is what is called "advocacy." This advocacy is performed by the people Horowitz calls "the deep swimmers of the Left."

Mr. Treglia urged grantees to keep Pew's role hush-hush. "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort," he confided, "it'd be worthless. It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain."

Read entire. Everyone, regardless of their politics, should be upset with what is happening. This is infringement of free political speech, and it is an insidious erosion of the Constitution. Repeal McCain-Feingold.

Excerpts from The Impending Collapse of Arab Civilization

I'd like to post the entirety of Col. Lacey's enormously provocative piece, but I don't think I can. The piece is by Lieutenant Colonel James G. Lacey, U.S. Army Reserve, pulbished in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, Sept., 2005. His basic thesis is that Islamism is the symptom, but the disease is a civilization at death's door, which counters Bernard Lewis' widely accepted thesis about jihad. At the end of his piece, he offers some solutions, especially an old-fashioned one - "containment." Generous excerpts from this important piece, which deserves to make the rounds, follow (link is at end of continuation page):

"A more accurate understanding of events leads to the conclusion that Arab, not Muslim, civilization is in a state of collapse, and it just happens that most Arabs are Muslims. In this regard, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was a collapse of Western Europe and not a crisis of Christianity. The next question is, how could the world have missed an entire civilization collapsing before its eyes? The simple answer is that no one alive today has ever seen it happen before. Well within living memory we have seen empires collapse and nation-state failure has become a regular occurrence, but no one in the West has witnessed the collapse of a civilization since the Dark Ages. Civilizational collapses take a long time to unfold and are easy to miss in the welter of daily events.

Interestingly, on the Arab League's website there is a paper that details all of the contributions made by Arab civilization. It is a long and impressive list, which unfortunately marks 1406 as the last year a significant contribution was made. That makes next year the 600th anniversary of the beginning of a prolonged stagnation, which began a dive into the abyss with the end of the Ottoman Empire. Final collapse has been staved off only by the cash coming in from a sea of oil and because of a few bright spots of modernity that have resisted the general failure.

Statistics tell an ugly story about the state of Arab civilization. According to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report:

• There are 18 computers per 1000 citizens compared to a global average of 78.3.

• Only 1.6% of the population has Internet access.

• Less than one book a year is translated into Arabic per million people, compared to over 1000 per million for developed countries.

• Arabs publish only 1.1% of books globally, despite making up over 5% of global population, with religious books dominating the market.

• Average R&D expenditures on a per capita basis is one-sixth of Cuba's and less than one-fifteenth of Japan's.

The Arab world is embarking upon the new century burdened by 60 million illiterate adults (the majority are women) and a declining education system, which is failing to properly prepare regional youth for the challenges of a globalized economy. Educational quality is also being eroded by the growing pervasiveness of religion at all levels of the system. In Saudi Arabia over a quarter of all university degrees are in Islamic studies. In many other nations primary education is accomplished through Saudi-financed madrassas, which have filled the void left by government's abdication of its duty to educate the young.

In economic terms we have already commented that the combined weight of the Arab states is less than that of Spain. Strip oil out of Mideast exports and the entire region exports less than Finland. According to the transnational Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), regional economic growth is burdened by declining rates of investment in fixed capital structure, an inability to attract substantial foreign direct investment, and declining productivity — the economic trinity of disaster.

Economic stagnation coupled with rapid population growth is reducing living standards throughout the region, both comparatively and in real terms. In the heady days of the late 1970s oil boom, annual per-capita GDP growth of over 5% fueled high levels of expectations. GDP per-capita grew from $1,845 to $2,300. Today, after adjusting for inflation, it stands at $1,500, reflecting an overall decline in living standards over 30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa has done worse. If oil wealth is subtracted from the calculations the economic picture for the mass of Arab citizens becomes dire.

Things are indeed bad in the Arab world and will get much worse.

This statement should not be read as mere opinion.

Pink and Grey, Wolves and Sheep, Fear and Courage

Confederate Yankee says "Best essay I've ever read." It is damn good. "Tribes" by Eject eject eject. Read it.

In one short essay, James Nuechterlein takes Frank's entire book, What's Wrong with Kansas?, and mops the floor with it. And, at the same time, offers an alternate thesis which I both like and agree with. I began reading Frank's book in January, and read about a quarter of it - then did something I rarely do with books - I quit it. It is an elitist, Leftist, closed-minded condescending tantrum disguised as a book, with just one idea, which is a dusty 1930s idea. Please, Lefties, believe Frank's book, and do not read the following piece: