Roger Kimball on the 60s - Tariq Ali: Fool of '68. A quote:

“Passion,” like “idealism,” is a nostrum that the Left prescribes in order to relieve itself from the burdens of moral accountability. In a subtle essay called “Countercultures,” the political commentator Irving Kristol noted that the counterculture of the 1960s was in part a reaction against a society that had become increasingly secular, routinized, and crassly materialistic. In this respect, too, the counterculture can be understood as part of our Romantic inheritance, a plea for freedom and transcendence in a society increasingly dominated by the secular forces of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed, revolts of this tenor have been a staple of Romanticism since the nineteenth century: Dostoevski’s “underground man,” who seeks refuge from the imperatives of reason in willful arbitrariness, is only one example (a rather grim one) among countless others.

The danger, Kristol notes, is that the counterculture, in its attack on secular materialism, “will bring down—will discredit—human things that are of permanent importance. A spiritual rebellion against the constrictions of secular humanism could end up … in a celebration of irrationalism and a derogation of reason itself.” At a time when the radical tenets of the counterculture have become so thoroughly established and institutionalized in cultural life—when they have, in fact, come more and more to define the tastes, habits, and attitudes of the dominant culture—unmasking illegitimate claims to “liberation” and bogus feats of idealism emerges as a prime critical task.

To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago, we now live in that “moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” The long march of the cultural revolution of the 1960s has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians. The great irony is that this victory took place in the midst of a significant drift to the center-Right in electoral politics. The startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the dominance of left-wing, emancipationist attitudes and ideas in our culture. On the contrary, in the so-called “culture wars,” conservatives have been conspicuous losers.

Read the whole thing.

Best essay I have read on the subject, and it goes far beyond the story of the day. A quote:

One can argue (unconvincingly, in my view) that Christian morality and teaching mandate government and political efforts to aid the poor and oppressed — as opposed to our individual responsibilities along such lines, or those facilitated collectively through the church. What one can not do is square such a constricted, monotone theology with Christianity’s vast octaves of orthodox teaching and history. If Christianity is nothing more than do-good government social programs which require no personal moral transformation, which frequently cause more harm than good to their intended beneficiaries, and require no personal sanctification or sacrifice — then who needs Christianity at all? Wrapping social programs in Scripture verses and Jesus-talk does not make them “Christian” any more than putting mascara on a pig makes her Miss Universe.

and another:

The problem with ministers like Reverend Wright and others, who wrap their political and social agendas in Christian facades and Bible-talk, is that they are partly right. That social justice, concern for the poor and the underprivileged, and the mitigation of hatred and racism are — and have always been — emphatic teachings and priorities for Christianity is indisputable. But Christian opposition to injustice and oppression is not its sole and central doctrine, but rather a manifestation of the personal deliverance of the individual from the slavery and oppression of sin which Christianity offers. The half-righters have interchanged cause and effect — and thereby have guaranteed that the results of such efforts will be harmful rather than healing. For to be partly right is to be totally wrong — when the part in error is core truth about the nature of man and his relationship to God. Good deeds arising out of the darkness of the unredeemed heart invariably foster repression and dependency rather than deliverance and liberty. As Ratzinger points out, speaking of the natural evolution and outcome of liberation theology as a solution to oppression:

… the overthrow by means of revolutionary violence of structures which generate violence is not ipso facto the beginning of a just regime. A major fact of our time ought to evoke the reflection of all those who would sincerely work for the true liberation of their brothers: millions of our own contemporaries legitimately yearn to recover those basic freedoms of which they were deprived by totalitarian and atheistic regimes which came to power by violent and revolutionary means, precisely in the name of the liberation of the people.

Read the whole thing.

If you decide to revisit the now-famous Mamet Village Voice essay, read the comments too.

I value his essay for two reasons: first, because he put into words something close to what I experienced many years ago and, second, because Mamet's cultural status might offer some folks "permission" to take a fresh look at their views.

The trailer for Ben Stein's film (h/t, Anchoress):

We have written several times about the destructive effect of the FDR presidency, most recently here, so there is no need to repeat ourselves.

However, it is good to see that Burt Prelutsky has come around. He begins:

Growing up, as I did, in the home of Russian Jewish immigrants, it figures that I’d start out thinking that, by all rights, Franklin D. Roosevelt belonged on Mount Rushmore. But, all these years later, I have concluded that most of America’s woes can be traced back to his presidency, and that the best reason for him being up there along with Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, is that his head was already made of stone.

Although FDR is often, mistakenly, credited with bringing the Great Depression to an end, as Amity Shlaes made clear in her book, The Forgotten Man, his policies, which can best be described as socialistic and anti-business, in reality prolonged America’s misery. The mere fact that he and his economic advisors thought it made perfect sense to keep raising taxes during the 1930s suggests that their primary motive wasn’t to lift the country out of its economic morass, but to take advantage of the situation to inflate the power of the federal government.

The end result of his 12 years in the White House is a hodge-podge of Washington bureaucracies and an economy that finds the federal government being far and away the single largest employer in the U.S. Couple that with his personal fondness for Joseph Stalin, his filling his administration and the State Department with like-minded people, and you have a perfect blueprint for disaster. For as Thomas Jefferson recognized, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.”

Burt sounds like a Maggie's Farm contributor. Read the whole thing.

Photo: FDR around 1917.

Jeffrey Bell at Weekly Standard wonders how the Repubs might deal with the aftermath of a "failed presidency."

It's a worthwhile piece, but I am far from sure that Bush has been a failure - unless the measure of failure is the popularity poll of the week. Few presidents remain popular towards the end of 8 years, because everything they have done annoyed somebody.

EU to Ireland: Drop dead. Ireland and the EU. (h/t, Gates)

The passivity of Europe in the face of the EU's power grab is utterly beyond my comprehension. It must be the same people who were "Better Red than dead," because they have been subjected to an imperial conquest without a shot being fired.

"What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? And Just How Sensitive is the Climate Anyway? A final dispatch from the International Climate Change Conference"

From Bailey at Reason, with quotes from Vaclav Klaus. One bit:

Klaus noted that ideological environmentalism appeals to the same sort of people who have always been attracted to collectivist ideas. He warned that environmentalism at its worst is just the latest dogma to claim that a looming "crisis" requires people to sacrifice their prosperity and their freedoms for the greater good. Let me quote Klaus at length.

"Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical—the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality," warned Klaus. "What I have in mind [is], of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism."

Photo: Our favorite photo of tennis fan and freedom's champion Vaclav Klaus

A quote from a piece on Mayor Bloomberg at Pajamas:

Since he took office six years ago, Mike Bloomberg’s record is, among other things, a study in finicky prohibition. Not only is Bloomberg certain of what’s best for you, he knows you to lack the good sense to choose it. In order to ensure the well being of his charges, the Mayor has instituted a few laws about which he has said, “People will adjust very quickly and a lot of lives will be saved.” Has an American politician ever expressed a more vitally un-American sentiment? Dubious claims of life-saving aside, American citizens aren’t to be schoolmarmed into compulsory purification.

This connects with a piece from Wilkinson linked at Overcoming Bias. A quote:

I say, again and again, that it is an embarrassing non-sequitur to argue that people are "irrational" and then leap to the conclusion that they need benevolent paternal guidance from the state. After all, if people are irrational then voters are irrational, politicians are irrational, bureaucrats are irrational, etc. ... There is no way to wriggle out of the fact that people who win elections are just like the rest of us. ... I don't doubt that non-terrible policies are sometimes successfully enacted. To doubt that would be a bit like a market skeptic doubting that anyone ever succeeds in buying a candy bar. That would be terrifically dense. What I doubt, very strongly, is that the discovery of "irrationalities" undermines the authority of market institutions more than it undermines the authority of government institutions.

Well said. Serious adult people are not interested in controlling other adult people (unless they're married, of course).

From Mediocracy:

Steven Pinker has become a bit of a hero for those not entirely seduced by the mediocratic project. He is perhaps the only prominent academic prepared to trumpet the idea that ability is at least partly inherited. This idea has, apparently, become highly controversial, a fact which a visiting Martian might find rather bizarre. When the Financial Times reviewed The Blank Slate, it treated Pinker as some kind of firebrand radical, referring to his "dangerous work", and that it "would be best if it didn't get into the hands of those who would use it to terrifying ends".

and

... if people's sense of well-being comes from an assessment of their social status, and social status is relative, then extreme inequality can make people on the lower rungs feel defeated even if they are better off than most of humanity ... The medical researcher Richard Wilkinson, who documented these patterns, argues that low status triggers an ancient stress reaction ... Wilkinson argues that reducing economic inequality would make millions of lives happier, safer, and longer. (ibid)

An example of pseudo-rationality: in this case, an incomplete analysis that looks cogent but is actually biased. What it leaves out is (a) that we can only reduce ex post (= after the event) inequality by changing the rules of the game, and (b) that this is certain to have its own associated costs, which are left out of the equation. The need to compete for status is no less likely to be an important human drive than the need for status itself. If you make it harder for people to win, that may also generate stress. While there is plenty of research purporting to show the stressful effects of inequality, I doubt there is much (if any) looking into the stressful effects of intervention, restrictions, red tape, or deselection on ideological grounds (the flip-side of affirmative action).

Mediocracy thus presents an excellent case of pseudo-rationality in which the human costs of an intervention are ignored. In my experience, failure to enter these costs into calculations generally results in further problems which also end up begging for another government intervention to try to correct. Thus governments and agencies grow, on the fertile soil of their own manure.

Free advice for the NYT and the Boston Globe, if they wish to survive, from Jeff Jarvis. Darn interesting ideas. One quote:

As for the New York Times itself, I’d cut bait and turn it into a national newspaper — international in their dreams. The Times is not now and has not been for sometime a New York paper. So I’d either spin off or kill metro coverage. It could become a new local online collaborative journalistic network in the mold of the new Globe. Or it could die and I firmly believe a new and more nimble local network can emerge and take up the slack left. With that spinoff goes the Times production and distribution arms, in the Morgan model.

If these large newspapers can think outside the proverbial box, as Jeff suggests, they might have a fine future despite their Leftist views. Gee whiz, they're just newspapers - not God's gift to mankind. There is no shortage of interesting stuff to read - like Maggie's Farm, for one modest example.

At the NYT, some integrity and some balance wouldn't hurt, but is not their solution. Just don't dumb it down: the world does not need another USA Today targeted towards curious 3rd grade drop-outs. They need prosperous middlebrow readers like me, who look forward to the Book Review.

(NYC, by the way, has tons of newspapers, from countless neighborhood papers like Chelsea Now, The Staten Island Advance, and The Village Voice, to city-wide papers like The Daily News, The NY Post, The NY Sun, The New York Observer, and Newsday - and more. It's the ultimate newspaper town, and every suburb has at least one local rag. The complication is that the whole country is interested in what goes on in NYC and, nowadays, in our imperial state, Washington too. Alas, because I wish that what those bozos did in DC had no importance to me.)

I love newspapers, and worked on one during summers as a lad (The Hartford Courant, in the typewriter and linotype era), but now I only read online stuff (not including magazines and the local rag, which covers purely local matters and which is required for fire-starting, and for gun- and game-cleaning - and to find out which of your bonehead neighbors has been arrested for burglarizing a hardware store in Torrington).

Confession: I enjoy most of the Sunday NYT, and, between the wife and I, we pretty much give at least a glance at every page of the darn thing. It's their political spin and bias that give us migraines: "Can you believe they said this, honey?" (We cancelled the daily years ago, in a fit of disgust.)