Atheism and Belief

The debate between believers and atheists—perhaps the most important philosophical debate in the history of human culture—has continued since the Renaissance with periods of increase and abatement. Generally, the United States has been spared this conflict, until the recent and currently persistent preoccupation with Peter Hitchens, et al. 

While this debate is generally a terrible development—taking atheism seriously did Europe no good in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—it has had the benefit of requiring clear thinking from believers. 

For all their vaunted confidence in the ability of science to erode belief in God, atheists have rather surprisingly managed to evade the philosophical crux of the debate.

This crux may be formulated as follows:

1. In heated, polarizing, and significant debates, it is well to begin with a statement on which virtually everyone can agree.
2. In the debate over the existence of God, the statement with which virtually everyone can agree is as follows: The world exists, and it is imperfect.

Now it is a matter of fact that Christianity attempts to provide an explanation for both halves of this statement, whereas atheism simply does not. It is of course possible that the explanation provided by Christianity for this state of affairs is incorrect, but it is surely very odd that those who offer no explanation whatever (while simultaneously demanding one of others) feel superior to those offering such an explanation.

This very peculiar state of the debate ought to encourage humility in the atheists and a certain respect for their opponents; in fact, one too often finds just the opposite: that atheism tends to an arrogant certainty about matters that are far less certain than their bravado suggests.                                                 

The President and the Press

In recent weeks the press has been afire with indignation over President Trump’s attack on journalism as an institution. While the President has made clear that he decries only the purveyors of “fake news”and not journalism generally, the press, in part exhibiting the very behavior to which he objects, insists that he is attacking all journalists indiscriminately, with the implication that all journalists indiscriminately are essential to a functioning democracy.

The greatest frustration in attempting to analyze this situation carefully is that both parties to some degree intentionally obscure the subject. The President does so to inflame his base and to undermine the credibility of an institution that is almost monolithically opposed to his agenda. To the extent that President Trump is a political animal this is surely understandable since he has a case to make, supporters to rally, and goals to pursue. To the extent that he is President, his denunciations pose a potential danger, since a free press is invaluable in a healthy democracy.

One salient point, however, is that the press is hardly free anymore. As a matter of empirical fact, the mainstream press—and it is precisely the mainstream press that so objects to the President’s rhetoric on this subject—is animated by a harsh preconceived animosity toward the President, an animosity that has been demonstrated, both anecdotally and statistically again and again, by such places as the Media Research Center. Which leads to the second salient point: while the President should be more careful to distinguish the honest from the dishonest press, the press itself should be much more circumspect—i.e., it should not act as if it is above criticism. If it is dangerous for the President to attack so essential an institution as the press, then it is just as essential that the press maintain its integrity. If damaging the press through presidential attack is a serious threat to democracy, then it stands to reason that the press damaging itself through corruption, groupthink, and distortion or suppression of truth is just as damaging and ought to result in equally piercing alarms. That the press remains silent on this point suggests that it is not serious about the issue that it claims deeply to care about and that therefore these protests may be yet another dishonest attack on the President by a press horrified that a person so different from themselves should occupy so powerful a place in society.

Yes, the press is correct that the presidency is an enormously important institution that we should deeply respect and that the same is true of the institution of the press itself. One way to undermine such important institutions is to use intemperate rhetoric that with too broad a brush paints all journalists as corrupt. But if the President has a duty to speak with greater discrimination, then the press itself, in the interest of maintaining what it claims is the essential integrity of journalism in our nation, also has the sacred duty to judge fairly and depict accurately. And that, it has been shown, it refuses to do.

In this case the rhetoric of both the President and the press is too blunt an instrument clearly to express the truth. This is because both are to some extent demagogues. The President, however, has never specialized in nuance: that is no surprise. What is much more difficult to swallow is journalistic outrage that the President uses language precisely as the press nowadays does—in pursuit not always of truth but more often in pursuit of a political agenda. In two or six years President Trump will leave the White House. If one thinks of him as dishonest, that dishonesty will then be gone. The press, however, will remain: and the dishonesty of much of that tribe will continue to monopolize the public airwaves and occupy computer screens in pursuit of a political agenda just as stark and just as strongly pursued as the President’s.

Fake News

In regard to the currently hot topic of fake news, one is tempted ask whether “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” is an example and whether the dire predictions about the ravages of climate change to our planet by 2010 is another. One could ask the same question about any number of apparent hate crimes roundly condemned in the press, which have subsequently been exposed as lies--as when the homosexual pastor in Austin, TX, for instance, himself adorned with a slur a cake that he had purchased at Whole Foods or the recent burning of a black church in Mississippi by one of its members, who attempted to shift suspicion by painting the slogan “Vote Trump” on the side of the building. Although such incidents show that the left can traffic in political lies as well as anyone, the current left-wing obsession with fake news nevertheless does rest upon a serious dread.

That dread is the suspicion that we can no longer trust the masses of people--hence, of voters in our democratic society--clearly to understand the world around them and make rational decisions about it. In a stable world, anyone who spent half a minute looking at the story currently known as Pizzagate would see instantly that it is laughably false. (And one can also see instantly that belief in such an idea can have devastating results, even for perfectly innocent people.) Such analysis, however, isn't innate to human beings any more than is analysis of the physical world or the world of numbers and mathematics. The human mind can turn itself to and approve all manner of objects, including selfish desires, material wealth, kindness, hatred of the stranger, Sanskrit, chocolate, or Elvis Presley. The mind can also approve ideas for a variety of reasons, some of which have little to do with their truth or falsity--one need think only of the yes-man among the middle managers willing to approve any suggestion, no matter how inane, of the people upstairs so that he can join their ranks. The left is correct that in a democratic society voters must be able clearly to distinguish between truth and falsity in order to make correct--and therefore wise--decisions that will affect themselves and those who live with them.

Other forms of analysis--of musical harmony or the human body--require training of neophytes by experts, and democratic society has provided for the formal education of its young and the training of their minds before they participate fully as citizens by voting. (Hence the voting age in the United States coincides, for the most part, with graduation from school.) If it is now disturbingly common in our society for people to believe that John Podesta is a satanist or that a pizzeria in Washington DC favored by staffers of Hillary Clinton is a den for the ritualized sexual abuse of children, then one must surely ask not why these beliefs in particular have gained such wide acceptance but why those who believe them are unable or unwilling to analyze them and see them as preposterous on their face.

If people genuinely believe that 9-11 was an inside job, then we should ask why they lack even the rudimentary skills necessary to see the absurdity of such a claim. The fault must lie in large measure with our system of education. For decades conservatives have decried American public education as a scandal: now we see that twelve or more years devoid of serious demands on students’ intellect may in fact pose a serious danger to democratic society. And the irony that at long last the American left is beginning to reap the harvest of the substandard education they have so long fostered is at best very bitter indeed.

Another problem, however, may rest not in the inability to recognize truth but in the moral failing of holding beliefs for the sake of political convenience. As the middle manager may agree with his superiors only because he wants to be one of them, so also many people in our society seem to espouse beliefs not because they are correct but because doing so is necessary for them to belong to the tribe. Recognizing this bias in myself helps me see it as well in a very well educated friend who once told me that Sarah Palin is mentally challenged because claimed to be able to see Russia from her home in Wasilla, Alaska. When I pointed out to him that his statement was false, he refused, despite his inability to produce any other evidence, to change his assessment of Palin. To do so would have put him beyond the pale of those he had come to regard as enlightened, a group that he has staked his identity upon joining. His desire to speak the shibboleth with regard to Sarah Palin, an infallible gauge of one’s political correctness, is essential to his self-image, regardless of whether or not what he believes about her is true. Precisely the same is true about the belief of some conservatives with regard to President Obama’s being a Muslim. Back in the day, William F. Buckley, Jr. insisted on excommunicating from the movement anyone who made the idiotic claim that President Eisenhower a card-carrying member of the Communist conspiracy. Hindsight shows just how prescient Buckley’s insistence proved to be.

But if a person’s simple inability to detect a manifestly fraudulent claim indicts our system of education, then a person’s unwillingness to accept what he knows to be true calls seriously into question the moral training we give to our young. That problem reaches the heart of what is most vital to a civilization and its cultures--and is a subject proper not for a brief meditation or a post on a blog but for a lifetime of study and practice.

Tight

According to the conventional wisdom, while President Obama and Mitt Romney are running almost even in the popular vote, the President is handily ahead in the Electoral College. Close examination of the Electoral College tells a different story. If one visits the Realclearpolitics website and looks for the Do It Yourself electoral map, one sees immediately that the conventional narrative is not correct. On the DIY map, one begins with the Realclearpolitics map, in which the President is indeed ahead but nowhere close to the 270 electoral votes needed to secure reelection. At present, the map shows the President with 121; if one awards North Carolina nd Virginia to Romney--both of which I think are very likely--then the electoral count is 119-121. Romney will need to fight hard to get to 270, but so will President Obama. The race is much closer than the pundits say and at the moment is at least as likely to go Romney's way as Obama's.

That's one reason for increasing Democrat worry, which TMH thinks will manifest itself in a bitter, sardonic, superior and generally off putting Democrat Convention next week. Another reason for their desperation to reelect the President is that the Democrat Party faces a most uncertain future. Who, for example, can they nominate four years from now if the President should not be reelected? The only Democrat we can think of who has a favorable national profile is Hillary Clinton, while as they showed at the convention this week, the Republicans have an attractive array of people plausible as national candidates. From Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico to Nikki Haley of South Carolina, from Mia Love to Paul Ryan himself the Republican Party has an amazing and attractive deep field of inspirational leaders.

We Told You So

Well, not precisely, but TMH did make the point some time ago that the much-praised Fareed Zakaria is, upon close inspection, a bit short on ideas. As if to underscore the point, Zakaria apparently (partly) plagiarized a recent column in Time. As if further to underscore the fact that while appearing to be an independent thinker he is actually a high-toned liberal, Zakaria plagiarized from The New York Times.

On the credit side of the ledger, he did not claim to be a victim, and he did not blame other people--not even George W. Bush--for his error: he took full responsibility for what he did. Perhaps, then, as with so much else about the man, we need to revise our judgment that he is simply a liberal.

Time has apparently suspended his column for a month. We suppose it's just to rob him of his voice for appropriating the voice of another and to do so only temporarily since he plagiarized only a little. We wonder, though, whether since he did this once he might have done so on other occasions.

That Sly Carney Smile

Today the White House press briefing apparently witnessed quite a clatter about the advertisement by Priorities USA that presents the testimony of Joe Soptic, a former steel worker, who claims that his being laid off after Bain Capital assumed control of his company led to his wife's lack of treatment for and death from cancer. It has now become clear that Mitt Romney was no more connected with Mrs Soptic's death than was Kevin Bacon, yet Jay Carney again and again deflected any suggestion by the press corps that the President should denounce this fraud.

While we had thought that the Clinton Administration epitomized postmodernism, press briefings such as the one today gild the lily by showing that this White House can even spin spin. Far more worrisome than the ad itself--it's not as if we haven't seen and survived outrageous attacks before in American political history--is Jay Carney's supercilious treatment of the matter. With his smile telegraphing a smug certainty that his side only benefits from the controversy, Carney himself did what the Administration has been doing for the past several days in refusing to respond directly to the issue itself. The ad claims quite fraudulently that Romney is partly responsible for Mrs Soptic's death; on the other hand, it is now quite clear that the White House itself is the origin of the lie told in the ad--a lie compounded by the lie given out earlier this week that the White House had no connection to the ad whatsoever. So we are left with a completely bizarre situation of the White House casting opprobrium on Romney for something he never did, while flatly lying about its own behavior.

How to account for this mess? The White House is doing what it's doing because it knows that for the time being, it can only profit from this situation. So far, the White House has managed very successfully to avoid responsibility for any of its bad behavior, intentional or unintentional. With the economy in a dangerous deceleration and fuel prices again on the rise, the White House continues to blame George W. Bush, and the mainstream media utters no protest. In short order, Iran will have a nuclear weapon, which among other things will show the abysmal failure of the President's policy in the Middle East, and again the White House simply refuses to talk about the matter. In the rare moments that anyone pays attention to the deficit, which is rapidly increasing under Obama's tenure, the White House points out that Romney's tax proposals would...wait for it: increase the deficit.

And thus the White House sticks with the tactics that have served it so well over the past several years. Since the mainstream media acquiesced four years ago and refused to hold Obama accountable for any of his shortcomings--from a breathtaking lack of experience to his deeply suspicious associations with people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright--the White House knows that the majority of the media will refuse to hold the President responsible for any other mischief he may get up to. That leaves more centrist and conservative news outlets, such as Fox or the Drudge Report, but these institutions have been successfully ghettoized by the Administration and those in the mainstream media in competition with Fox and Drudge. Indeed, just days ago Jay Carney attacked the Drudge Report with a wink and a nod, insinuating for all those in the press room who speak his language that Drudge is an unreliable source, and the Obama Administration has practically made a second career of attacking Fox News. Not only, therefore, does itself never take responsibility for any of it's many failings but it has insulated itself from any criticism by others.

So the White House knows that if the President does not disavow the ad, the press will soon neuter the issue by beginning to report not on the President's lack of response but on the controversy as a controversy, which promotes the matter from being a crisis to which the President should respond to a matter that people are talking about. In the meantime, while people talk about it, the original claim--that Romney killed Mrs Soptic--continues to be made over and over, the claim will continue to run up Mitt Romney's negatives, and the swing states will slip ever further into to the blue column. Romney will lose, and in the warm glow of the second inauguration everyone will forget the filthy politics of the Reelect Obama campaign. And all the while, the lie that Mrs Soptic died because of being without health insurance will bolster support for Obamacare. On the other hand, if this controversy should suddenly grow into a crisis for the President, he can always step in and denounce the ad at any moment, in which case Romney's negatives will have still have increased, and the President will look like the post-partisan shining white knight that in his previous campaign he claimed to be.

The only way to handle such a crisis is for Romney himself to forget himself once and for all. He needs to quit thinking that this election is about him, his record, his resume, his ambition, his kind and moral decency and to engage in the fight filled with the conviction that the campaign is about three things (none of which happens to be Mitt Romney): the nation, which is rapidly deteriorating, the utter incompetence of this president, and the outrageous venality of a White House so desperate to fulfill its lust for power that it not only capitalize on the agonizing death of a good woman but freely, smilingly lie while doing so and about doing so. Romney needs, in short not to defend himself in the matter of Mrs Soptic but to talk fiercely and relentlessly about this situation as one that shows the utter corruption of this Administration. And he needs to select as his running mate not an avuncular Midwestern slice of bland white bread but a person with enough of a vision of what American liberty really means that the Republican ticket can wage a bold, inspiring campaign in the late summer and fall. Mitt Romney has a responsibility to all Republicans and all conservatives to do just that.

Whether Romney has the humility to forget himself and think only about the good of the nation is an open question. We sincerely hope he does. Having sought the nomination for president, he has a responsibility to do everything--within the bounds of honesty--to win the office. If he doesn't, those on the other side will have learned, once again, that the way to gain power and to govern is to lie with impunity, destroy the reputations of good people, and smile--ever so knowingly--while they do so.

Hate?

Breaking Update: Far Left Goon Is Fired After Abusing Young Female Employee at Chick-fil-A

Having been schooled in the contemporary lexicon of political correctness, we should all note the hate spewed by the employee here and the respectful tolerance of Mr Smith, who as the CFO of a corporation talking to a fast food cashier is obviously speaking truth to power.

Don't Blame Us for the Culture War, Part II

This morning, The Weekly Standard had this to say on its website about the apparently record day of sales at Chic-fil-A yesterday: "Pastor Rick Warren reported last night on Twitter that fast food chain Chick-fil-A 'set a world record' yesterday. His claim is based off a phone call he had with Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-A who ignited a culture war when he expressed his preference for traditional marriage." While we generally love The Weekly Standard, we recognize that as a fallible organ it occasionally misspeaks, and so it has here.

Dan Cathy did NOT "ignite a culture war": first of all, the culture war has long been raging. Second, Cathy merely said what, for example, President Obama used to say as recently as this winter. Third, those who came out to support Chic-fil-A yesterday showed how opposed they are to an escalation of the war. When one can be punished by the government (in the form of municipalities that refuse to allow your business to expand in their towns) express an opinion that was apparently fine just six months ago, then we are on a very slippery slope to a nightmare world governed by adepts in Doublespeak.

Or maybe it's reached the level of Triplespeak by now. How many of those who say that a person must be punished for saying today what was fine for the President to say several months ago would be willing to punish radical Muslims who think not just that marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals but that those who disagree ought to be killed?

Spread the Wealth

A retweet today--a review at Powerlineblog of what appears to be a most interesting book. The thesis is that given a second term President Obama would make it a major goal to tax the suburbs to redistribute wealth to the cities. It sounds plausible, given everything we know about this President:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/michelle-obamas-shhhh-moment-and-what-it-tells-us-about-her-husbands-plans-to-spread-the-wealth.php





As often, the details are the most telling. I haven't read the book and so can't endorse it, but at the very least it seems worth knowing about.

Religion and Tolerance

The controversy stirred up this week both by the remarks of the CEO of Chic-fil-A on the one hand and the mayors of Chicago and Boston on the other has been most revealing indeed. For one thing, the controversy has served to show, once again, that contemporary PC values are on a head-on collision with traditional beliefs of all kinds, most notably traditional Christianity. For decades, we lived with a type of cultural Cold War, in which liberals made headway into the culture by commandeering discourse about race, abortion, economics, divorce, and so on. And about most of these matters, religion was, when it found conflict on these topics distasteful, able to look the other way, since none of these was an existential threat to traditional religion itself. Technically speaking, one might argue that the Bible doesn't address abortion directly; it seems to permit divorce (though it allows remarriage only under very restricted conditions), and it says nothing favoring one economic system over another. So far so good: though traditional religion might be uneasy with liberal positions, it could, to this point, ignore them and get on with its own business.

Lately, however, things have taken a turn. Despite the fact that society is split on the matter of homosexual marriage, and despite it not being allowed in most states, popular culture now seems to view it as a matter of hate worthy of social excommunication if one expresses support for the norm. When a couple of years ago Carrie Prejean said in the Miss USA pageant what a majority of Americans believe and what has been the norm throughout recorded history in virtually all societies about which we have records, she was roundly anathematized by the press. Perhaps she knew then what Dan Cathy, the President of Chic-fil-A probably suspects now--that on the matter of marriage, there can be no compromise between homosexual rights and traditional religion. And this is true not because traditional Christians are bigots but because the Bible, the focus of belief for Protestant Christians, and the Magisterium, which is the collected authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church, could not be clearer that homosexuality is wrong. The acceptance of homosexual marriage is directly incompatible with the clear teaching of traditional Christianity. This was clearly demonstrated in Massachusettes when, because the state allows same-sex marriage the Catholic Church could no longer provide adoption services, even though it had long been the largest such provider in the state. Why? Because on the matter of homosexual marriage the Church is required by very clear teaching to voice disapproval: when it condemns what the state recognizes as legal, it can no longer occupy the public space.

TMH has written before that since the question of origins has long been a religious question, teaching on origins that contradicts the religious view must constitute an unconstitutional discussion of religious topics in the public schools: something very similar is true of homosexuality. When the government--as embodied by the mayors of Chicago and Boston--try to enlist the engines of government in saying that the only acceptable position on homosexual marriage is the non-traditional one, then they are, by definition, using the government to attack traditional Christianity. Although they appear to be talking about neutral issues like tolerance and sexual orientation, the logical interpretation and the infallible result of their position is that traditional Christianity is no longer compatable with American culture.

That may indeed be the case, and it may in fact be the result that the kids, in particular, who the pollsters tell us are so fervently in favor of same-sex marriage, wish. But it will be well for the political discourse if we were honest about what is at stake: homosexual marriage is incompatible with traditional religion, and the society that celebrates the one will hardly be able to tolerate the latter.

Much Too Cool

After a long trip yesterday exploring some truly interesting spots off the beaten track in north central Mississippi, I returned home tired but happy. I remained tired, but I grew steadily less happy and more puzzled as I watched the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. To be sure, the matter of rings, forged by mock factory workers meant to evoke the dark grime of Industrial Revolution, was impressive, as was the presence of the RAF jets, but that was almost the only thing about the ceremony that gave unalloyed pleasure. Anything else that might have pleased tended to evoke confusion: why, I wondered, does Queen Elizabeth jump out of a helicopter? I know that James Bond might, but in what possible way is the Queen asociated with skydiving? There, indeed, was the stunt, impressive in its timing and precision, but instead of being able to enjoy it, one was distracted by a question without solution.

Other moments made more sense: dancing aound the maypole is very English, I suppose (though this summer I saw a truly joyful maypole celebration in Bavaria), as was the business with the Dickensian tophats and smokestacks (though again, the Industrian Revolution is also part of German history), but these moments tended to be flat. In a pageant of English history, we were treated to a glimpse of bucolic medieval life, the Industrial Revolution, marching suffrgettes, and a few guys in uniforms from WWI: toward the end, these were all intermixed with redcoats surmounted with three-cornered hats in what was meant either to evoke such London traditions as the Lord Mayor's Parade or to concoct a soup into which bits of British cultural references floated indiscriminately about. What ingredient the large bicycle with the disproportionately menacing tuba was meant to suggest was, once again, a puzzle.

That part of the ceremony concluded with a phantasmagoria stemming from children's literature, with primary reference to Peter Pan, though near the end, J.K. Rowling managed to toss in a few words--too few to make much of an impression, so that, once again, one was left with the impression that she appeared, ad hoc, for good measure, as if to satisfy the expectations of her fans around the world. One might note that the references to children's literature came in the context of a nursery ward of some sort, in which children presumbaly suffering from illness or neglect were shown to be comforted or entertained by, among other touchstones of British nursery culture, dozens of Mary Poppinses floating down, black umbrellas fully opened at the ends of outstreched arms.

Toward the end England treated the world to yet another pageant, this one lossely based around the story of a boy who likes a girl whom he pursues against a backdrop of allusions to popular British music from the 1950s onward. Straightforward as one might expect such a segment to be, even one of the children in my household expressed confusion at how the boy, on finding and picking up the cell phone which the girl had dropped, managed to use her cell phone to call her--by the normal laws of telecommunications, he would have been calling himself (since he was after all holding her phone and she wasn't). As well as I remember, that was the end of the artistic portion of the O.C., after which the pedestrian parade of nations was a positive relief.

Strangely, the O.C. resolutely avoided any refence to anything that might lift the human spirit by alluding to anything truly great in British culture. The only culture refered to was low and popular. No reference (so far as I could see) to Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest writer who has inhabited the planet, no reference to the defiance of the English in WWII, though during the James Bond sequence we were treated to a passing, ironic reference to Winston Churchill. There was no reference to the great British explorations, the truly awesome power of the Royal Navy on the high seas, no sense of Britain for two hundred years the civilized and civilizing seat of commerce and trade, no allusion to Britain which led the fight among the Western powers to free the slaves. The references to British music--Handel, Elgar, Vaughn Williams--was reduced to an interlude in which a small orchestra played the truly inspiring theme from "Chariots of Fire" (cmposed by a Greek, no?), but Rowland Atkinson's gags during that segment had the effect of ridiculing an otherwise fine performance. The main allusion to British literature was to children's literature, though again to the popularly entertaining, since as far as I could see, the truly uplifting "Wind and the Willows" received no homage at all.

More than anything, what the the O.C. conveyed was a culture uncomfortable with itself and utterly disillusioned. The soldiers that presented the British flag seemed sightly out of pace with one another, and even what might have been a spirited rendition of "God Save the Queen" was made made cute and inoffensive by having the anthem led by a group of children that used sign language all the way through. One got the impression that no true cultural tradition could be left untouched by some gesture, however subtle, of distancing comment, that there was nothing included that might threaten to give the audience an unalloyed sense of wonder and excitement. Particularly toward the end, the cultural references were low at best, and they seemed at times to celebrate those whose controversial lives tended to affront traditional values--Amy Winehouse and Queen most prominent among them.

In the end, I was left with the impression of a halfhearted celebration (did anyone note the listless physical motions of the front line of dancers near the end of the pageant of history?) of an anodyne British culture and a much more energetic celebration of its more recent counterculture. It was, perhaps, all in all an exercise in cultural irony, the meaning of which seemed to be that we are comfortable only with popular culture: of anything else we are either ignorant or it produces in us boredom and indifference.

I seem not to remember other O.C.s besides the one in Beijing four years ago, but compared with that, last night's performance was an embarrassment. In Beijing the Chinese celebrated their culture, even to the point of embellishing it (when, exactly, are the Chinese known for having exported their culture by ship?), but then even such embellishment indicates a culture proud enough to view itsef as the stuff of myth and legend that gives shape to life and helps its members make sense of the world and lead meaningful lives in it. I wouldn't say that China celebrated in an imperialistic way, but their military procession that carried and raised their flag was impressive in the sharpness of its movements, and the incandescent energy of the choreographed movements of the large groups assembled on stage was only one of many positive impressions from the ceremony. The sense of wonder when we found out that the impressive display of moveable type was not mechanical but rendered by humans, the amazingly precise and intricate movements of hundreds of dancers on stage, the use fireworks throughout, and the complete lack of ironic comment on all of this was refreshing and left the audience, if not with a feeling of transcendance, at least with a sense that human beings inhabit and are able to help create a world that takes us out of ourselves. The Chinese relished their moment; the British, by contrast, seemed embarrassed--like a bored school child called upon to give a report on British history. What can he do to show that he's above it all, jaded, sophisticated, an untouched in his spirit because he's too busy, too connected even to have a spirit after all? Do as little as possible and then ironize everything to show your chums that you are way too cool to take seriously the thought that anything, anything at all might be bigger than yourself.

Nationalism?

The events of the day in Syria are both thrilling and alarming. Thrilling, of course, because the audacious suicide strike that seems to have decapitated Assad's regime may bring an end to the dictatorship much more quickly than was anticipated even a few days ago; alarming on account of the rapid pace of change in that country. More alarming still, we think, because once again America seems to be on the wrong side of history. As we mentioned in this space several times before, the unimaginably brave Syrian rebels, who sacrificed themselves by the thousands in what must for months have seemed like an entirely hopeless cause, deserve the freedom that they have fought valiantly to achieve, but the United States, which ought everywhere to support such opposition to vicious authoritarian rule, was so silent as to essentially show contempt for the Syrian revolution. That we offered scant friendship to freedom in Syria makes little sense, unless one believes what we have so far been reluctant to assert but for which there appears mounting evidence--to wit, that President Obama seems to support the overthrow of regimes like that in Egypt which are friendly to the U.S. and Israel and to offer no support for the overthrow of even more brutal regimes which actively work against our interests. The price of such an insane policy (if it is indeed a policy and not merely pure ineptitude) will inevitably be that the new Syrian government will remember America's indifference and be impervious to American influence, when we could, by aiding the rebels when it would have mattered, have secured yet another ally in the heart of a troubling part of the world.

Speaking of national movements, one notes that there appears in southern Europe to be a growing dissatisfaction with the European Union, largely, of course, because Greece and Italy, whose people have a more casual, less economically responsible way of life than do their northern European counterparts, wish their more responsible neighbors to give them money and do not wish to abide by the rules with which that money comes. Germany is now the colossus that dominates the European economy, and so the Germans now begin to feel the resentments of the southern European nations. Why the resentment? The Germans have several times now transferred to Greece and Spain large sums of cash taken from German taxpayers, yet the Germans are reviled.

The situation is ironic because it mirrors German attitudes toward the United States thirty years ago. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan, asserting American power, put intermediate range nuclear missiles in Germany to huge outcry from a country that the Americans less than forty years before had liberated from an insane tyranny and had then rebuilt with American taxpayer money. When I was there then, I remember my extended family denouncing American policy to me with an anger that grew sharper as I reminded them of what America had done for Germany in the past. In the end, of course, Reagan's policy succeeded and the existential threat posed by Communism to western Europe died away. And now it is Germany's turn. Just as America was--and often still is--resented by weaker nations simply because it was--and is--powerful, so now the German ant, which has worked and saved all the year long is resented by the southern European grasshopper simply because Germany has more. This is all a reminder that nationalism isn't always a good thing. One major reason, now often forgotten, for the European Union in the first place is that in the old Europe of the early twentieth century nationalism meant rivalry, tension, and often war; countries within the European Union, however, do not go to war against one another. If that Union should dissolve, the old resentments, baseless though they may be, will return and with them will return the possibility, however remote, of war.

The dangerous rise of nationalism is captured in literature nowhere so well as in Joseph Roth's very fine German novel Radetzkymarsch, set in the waning years of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, for which Roth had a great deal of fondness. His fondness was based in part on his conviction that once that old Habsburg empire dissolved into a number of distinct nationalities, the old, generally peaceful, generally civilized order would be drowned in a cacophonous babble of voices all demanding power, all willing to gain that power through the quickest, and therefore the most corrupt and dangerous ways possible. In a climactic scene near the end, a ball in a regional Imperial town is disrupted with news of the Archduke's assassination, and the various military officers, from different ethnic groups but serving the same Emperor Franz Josef I, begin shouting at one another not in the official German that they had been using that night but each in his own native language. As Europe begins its rapid descent into the chaos of contending interests that exploded in WWI, so these characters begin to express with venomous intensity the old hatreds and resentments that had to this been point been subsumed by their common purpose in a large enterprise.

What the overthrow of the old orders, welcome though these changes are, will bring in the Middle East God only knows. As European dissolution looks also like a possibility--though only like a possibility--one remembers that the severing of international ties, while it may allow many little men to strut and fret their hour upon the stage of life, is not always a good thing.

Comfortable Illusions, Hard Reality

Today is a sad day in American political and judicial history. Our Supreme Court has shown itself once again to be masters of sophistry, laying themselves open to the preposterous arguments of the Obama Administration which claims on certain days of the week that the individual mandate is not a tax and on other days that it is a tax; in so doing, the current ruling lies in a tradition of decisions based upon untruth. The beginning of this tradition is the claim in Griswold v. Connecticut that when the Constitution supplies no grounds for a certain decision, shadows and penumbras (i.e., pretexts) will provide the excuse necessary to allow a ruling that the actual text of the Constitution will not allow; one remembers, too, that Roe v. Wade was based upon the lie that Norma Jean McCorvey had been impregnated as a result of rape, a lie that McCorvey herself has often repudiated. That we are governed by sophistry is really no surprise, since sophistry is simply the most expedient alternative to truth. Truth, which is simply the description of reality, conveys the realities of existence, one of the most basic of which is that success requires hard work and that short cuts usually give us terrible results. Today's decision bynthe Supreme Court underscores precisely those truths about life. As a society, we reject ever more emphatically these ancient truths, and so we are left with illusion, with the hope (half, after all, of the President's reason for being) that we can leave easy, comfortable lives not requiring much in the way of hard, sacrificial contact with the rough surface of reality. It is precisely this love of illusion, which tells us that we can have something for nothing, that has placed us in our current predicament. Several years ago, when things in Iraq were difficult, we began as a society to say that we never needed to be there to make that sacrifice, that in fact the only reason we were there is because President Bush unilaterally decided to invade that nation. We delude ourselves into forgetting that Congress voted to give the President the authority to invade Iraq--even those liberal Senators voted for it. So then, faced with historical reality, we fall back on the illusion that President Bush lied us into war, that he tricked us, once again ignoring the historical reality that President Bush provided all the relevant intelligence to Congress before their vote and that most of those who voted for the invasion and later claimed to be against it refused even to look at the President's evidence when it was offered. So we prefer illusion, which is more convenient in the short term, though it leaves us with the dangerous ability to justify virtually any conduct with virtually any argument. It is this love of illusion that led many people to vote for President Obama in 2008, on the grounds that "Hope and Change" actually meant something, that it was not the empty slogan of the demagogue. And in voting for him, so many were able to congratulate themselves on choosing cool over the solid virtue and hard-won accomplishment of John McCain, President Obama's opponent. Such was the clear implication of Peggy Noonan, who, if she really is as sophisticated as she thinks of herself as being, ought to have known better. But that's precisely the problem: she, and so many others like her, are sophisticated, too clever for the hard old virtues, and so she breathed huskily about how cool and sophisticated Senator Obama is. Her sophistication also expressed itself with disdain about Sarah Palin, also a person who achieved success with hard work bred by her association with old unsophisticated understanding of the hardness of the world in the way it really works. This illusion that we can be politically cool without consequence is now shown finally to be dangerous. A vote for Obama was a vote, as he warned us, for a complete transformation of our society. Now that the damage has been done, we are again faced with a choice, this time perhaps possibly final. The only way to repudiate the dangerous life of political illusion into which we have fallen is to wake ourselves and take up the hard task of hard electoral politics. That it can be done is evident by the recent victory in Wisconsin, but it will take across the nation what it took there--sacrificial financial contribution and sacrificial commitment of time and energy. In the short term, this decision by the Supreme Court is a good thing, since, by placing the very unpopular health care bill at the center of the summer campaign, it may well be the nail in the President's coffin. But the defeat of Obama will not undo his legislation. The only way to do that is to keep the House and win the Senate by an overwhelming margin. Again, that can be done, but it will take a commitment to almost superhuman and sacrificial political virtue. If, as has so far been the case, we prefer life of illusion because political life in the real world is just too hard, then we will find that we have today taken a very great slide along what Hayek called the Road to Serfdom. A couple of months ago on The O'Reilly Factor, Bernie Goldberg made the arresting remark that Americans are addicted to entertainment and that that addiction is a very bad thing. Entertainment gives us cool; its very heart blood is to take the empty and insignificant and by dressing it smartly, providing it with an emotional soundtrack, giving it a script full of currently cool expressions, and surrounding it with carefully-coordinated pastel backdrops, making us believe that it means anything. The mere fact that we can let ourselves be thus deceived--and deceived to the point of electing Barack Obama--means that we are no longer instinctively at home in the world of hard reality. The only way to recover our identity as truly free men is to tear our eyes from the meretricious and eternally flickering images on the wall of Plato's cave and begin the long, hard slog up the tunnel into the harsh light of the world of reality. If we don't, we can continue to enjoy the life of illusion for awhile longer. But if we wish to recover what we've lost, we will need to elect a conservative Congress that will not only repeal the Affordable Care Act and confirm as a matter of course conservative justices to the Supreme Court, year after year. Nothing else will do.

Fast and Furious

The big news out of Washington today goes to show just how unpredictable important events--like a presidential election--can be in our world of rapidly disclosed information in our tech-rich environment. After making it seem last night as if he would hand over today the documents sought by Congress on the Fast and Furious matter, Attorney General Eric Holder has instead informed the House Committee asking for these papers that President Obama has locked them away under Executive Privilege. We don't here wish to wade into the tiresome debate about Executive Privilege (President Bush invoked it to keep from handing over documents to Congressional committees, so does that make it alright? Senator Obama thought it was wrong for President Bush to do so; does that make it wrong?). We do wish to point out, however, that so intently concerned about reelection as President Obama is at the moment, there is no way that he would risk looking like President Nixon if he didn't have to. Hence it seems clear that according to a cost-benefit analysis the White House deemed it less damaging to stonewall than to reveal what these documents contain. At the very least, that must mean that these documents indicate that Eric Holder lied to Congress when he claimed not to have known about Fast and Furious; at the most, it might mean that the President himself knew about the operation--a huge political liability because Fast and Furious was a stupid program that may well have helped kill a United States Border Patrol agent. The operation involves the emotionally charged issues of illegal immigration of the worst sort, gun ownership for criminal purposes, and drug smuggling. Therefore, being associated with Fast and Furious would be a disaster for President Obama--a bigger disaster even than appearing to cover up by means of Executive Privilege possible malfeasance in his Administration. That is the most plausible reason why a vulnerable President Obama would take the hit that he surely will for not releasing these documents.

Praise and Blame

Kudos to George Clooney for appearing on Fox News Sunday this morning in order to bring attention to the plight of non-combatant civilians in Sudan. Good show first of all that the über liberal Clooney would appear on Fox, which is typically a whipping boy of committed leftists, even better that he's calling attention to the hardships of innocent civilians in a corner of the world that few people care about. To our mind, Clooney is a fair-minded liberal of the sort that one can have constructive dialogue with, not one of the all-too-common type today for whom power is everything and who therefore are willing to stoop to any tactics to achieve their goals.


No kudos whatsoever to President Obama for his response to another place in which non-combatant civilians are being ground beneath the authoritarian boot in the worst tradition of the twentieth century: Syria. We have discussed before the odd fact that when the Arab spring came to regimes friendly or responsive to the United States, the President lent both moral and material support to those who overthrew those regimes, while in places like Iran and Syria, with regimes hostile to the United States, he says as little as he can get away with. Not being conspiracy theorists, we don't charge the President here with a hidden agenda, but we do think that he ought to speak out against tyranny where freedom has a serious chance of replacing it. President Obama's virtual silence two years ago during the uprisings in Tehran was shameful; equally shameful is his lack of vigorous response to the rebellion in Syria. The people of Syria are worthy of immense respect for their dogged resistance in the face of overwhelming firepower. Even two months ago their cause seemed hopeless, which alone earns them the respect of freedom loving people everywhere. Now, with no help from the United States, the rebels appear to have a significant chance of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad. (According to the Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Jazeera this week, Assad seems to have lost politically, and the sense in Syria is that he will be leaving.) That the United States appears indifferent to their heroic and inspiring attempt at freedom is a terrible thing which can only damage our reputation as the friend of freedom everywhere in the world.

Not Mitt

Politically, it has been a rich and confusing cycle. A year ago, speculation was rampant about which of the strong Republican contenders would enter the race for President, and there were many--Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour. In the end, we were left with a rather weak field, led by Mitt Romney, who looks good on paper but in the flesh leaves the average Republican voter interested, but for all the wrong reasons. I share with many Republicans two objections to Romney, one which he might have been able to overcome and one which I think will end the prove seriously damaging not only to him personally but also to the Republican Party.

The first is the obvious problem of solving the riddle. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney governed like a liberal--not perhaps compared with most recent politicians from the state but compared to virtually all Republicans anywhere else. He compromised a great deal and did not fight for conservative principles. Many have explained that governing from the right is not a serious option in Massachusetts, and they may be correct; however, governing from the center or center left doesn't leave one with any serious credentials as a Republican man of experience. The fact is that Romney's political experience would suit a Democrat perfectly--leftish but still reasonable enough to make him palatable to voters in the general election. The lack of a serious conservative record means that what we most want to know about him--whether he will fight the liberals in the Senate for, say, conservative nominees to the Supreme Court--is a serious question. In as polarized a polity as is ours at the present time, we can no longer afford David Souters on the Court. Romney claims that he is conservative, but that claim is belied by his record as Governor. Will he govern as a conservative from the White House? His record makes it impossible to say.

The second problem is the manner in which he runs his campaign. Since his politics are murky, he finds it difficult to run a positive campaign: I still cannot say what exactly Romney stands for, other than general competence (precisely what Michael "this election is not about ideology but about competence" Dukakis ran on in 1988). Neither, apparently, can many other voters, which is why, when the field was larger, week after week, the attitude of anyone but Romney launched Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain, and Santorum to the front of the pack. In contrast with Romney, each of these candidates had a positive message which allowed voters to distinguish between them. And as soon as each of these candidates began to look like a serious contender, Romney began savagely to attack, wounding each of them so badly that they began to falter. To be sure, some of these candidates, like Perry and Cain, also damaged themselves, but Romney ensured that they would not survive the heavy artillery of his negative ads. That is one way to ensure that no one stands in Romney's way, but it will also ensure bad feeling and further lack of trust. Part of the wisdom of Reagan's famous eleventh commandment is that it promotes good feeling within the Party; Romney's destructive, negative campaign does just the opposite. What he did to Gingrich, and Gingrich's immature but natural and thus understandable response, is a perfect example of what such negative campaigning can do.

In the end, Romney is likely to win the nomination. He may even defeat President Obama. If he does so, however, it will be not because anyone likes Romney and is willing to support him because of what he stands for. Rather, it will be because he trashed the other guys. That is not a mandate. As Newt Gingrich showed in the 1990s and Barack Obama more recently, much can be accomplished by a positive campaign. And neither of these men ran simply one-dimensional positive campaigns: both were willing to make clear distinctions between themselves and what they thought was bad policy for the country. But relentlessly negative campaigns don't do that. In Romney's case, trashing the other guy still tells us nothing about Romney--other than that he very, very badly wants to be President. I am not at all convinced that they who want it the most ought to have it.

The President at College

No, we are not at present discussing the fact that President Obama, who promised unparalleled transparency, has not released his college transcripts. Why he has not, no one can be quite sure: perhaps his transcripts would run counter to the myth of Obama's native brilliance, a myth, it's worth pointing out, that involves far more than the current President himself, since every Republican Presidential nominee in our memory has always been portrayed as a dunce (sometimes amiable, sometimes not) and every Democratic nominee as an intellectual giant. It is an article of faith in the mainstream media, so much so that one can hardly blame John Kerry for famously lamenting on election day 2004 in regard to George W. Bush, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." The reflexively contradictory nature of the statement itself might have been a clue that something is inherently wrong with the myth; for those innocent of elementary logic, the historical fact might have been instructive, since the putative Republican dunces more often than not defeat the Democratic geniuses. In an enterprise of such complexity--rhetorical, historical, sociological, statistical, economic, and so on--as a national election, the intellectual David really should not be able to slay the mental Goliath with such predictable regularity.

But let all that pass: it is with President Obama's comments yesterday at the University of Michigan that we have to do. In decrying the rapid rise of college tuition, the President put public universities on notice that if they do not find a way to curb cost, he will find ways to withhold Federal money from their budgets. As usual (and as more usual in an election year), some Republicans reacted negatively to this proposal, arguing that the President is again interfering with Freedom of Enterprise by telling colleges how they should charge tuition. Now we have no doubt that the President, also well aware that this is an election year, is saying what he is saying for the worst possible reasons, but it does give one pause that in the matter of college tuition, the President at the very least has a genuine issue on which to give a speech. For the past fifty years, the best path to a comfortably affluent life led through a college education to a profession that allowed one the potential for growth as the economy continued its predictable expansion. Now, however, college, and with it the reasonable certainty of a good life is being pushed beyond the reach of the middle class. In the case of TMH, college some thirty or so years ago cost (without room and board) about $1000 per year, and the last two years were easily paid for by unsought scholarships that came as the reward of the merest modicum of effort. This was of course at a public university, but certainly not a third-rate one: the fact was that a solid education in the Honors College of a major public university could be had in those days for so modest a cost. In such a case, paying for tuition and books was well within the reach of most middle-class parents, even if it meant some sacrifice. One of the major reasons for these low costs is that the universities in those days were modest affairs that functioned by providing the basic elements of a university education: students, faculty, facilities (including dormitories and a library or two), and the minimal administration necessary to keep faculty and students together.

Now, however, things are different. College costs vastly more--so much more that providing children to college now requires on the order of $15,000-$20,000 a year, even at very small regional public universities. To be sure, some of the increase is due to the cost of better facilities, such as dorms that look like reports, with suites for sleeping, basement wellness center for exercise of the body, and lounges and computer labs putatively for improvement of the mind. Still, such costs are relatively fixed in the sense that the residence resort gets built only once and probably does not cost vastly more to maintain than does the old concrete dorm built a quarter-century ago in the brutalist style apparently so essential to the aesthetic experience of a higher education across the land. A much larger potential expense is new employees at the universities. First, such employees, whoever they be, are not a one-time expense like the new building: they require an annual salary, which may be frequently increased over the course of their twenty-five or thirty years of employment, and they require the medical plans that come with these salaries. Second, colleges over the past quarter century have tended to hire not so much new faculty members but administrators. Colleges do so for the simple reason that colleges--at least public colleges--are, like virtually all other governmental or quasi-governmental organizations, bureaucracies, and the main principle about bureaucracies, first and last, is that they exist primarily for the benefit of those they employ. In the case of public colleges, they have since the 1980s almost without exception evolved into institutions which exist primarily to provide (relatively well-paid) employment for those working there. And so, like all bureaucracies, they must perpetuate themselves, primarily by continuing to hire more administrators to oversee the paradoxically growing number of administrators. Spatula has pointed out that as a national average colleges now employ more administrators than faculty members, a baroque condition entirely unnecessary if universities existed to educate students.

TMH has only a sentimental opposition to bureaucracy: in the cold light of logical analysis, we have no firm opposition to any private corporation that wishes for its own ends to hire as many administrators as there are offices in its buildings, computers to monitor, or keyboards at which to type. But public institutions, which are funded to a large degree by taxpayer money--that is to say by the salaries of average men and women working in order to provide better lives for their families--have a responsibility to treat their budgets and their missions with the greatest respect. Those administrators who are paid by public money have an obligation to use those funds precisely to educate students. When faced with a choice, they should always decide to hire the extra faculty member, who may very well be essential and thus by educating his students make a very real contribution to the public good, rather then the third assistant vice president for intramural affairs. The unfortunate matter of fact is that over time college administrations have grown more autocratic and have taken on more and more power to make the essential decisions, while faculty lose ever more voice in collegiate governance; it is no surprise that in the end the administrators in charge of slicing the pie slice it so that they receive ever larger portions. As an actual fact, then, public universities have to a large degree become marked by a soft and genteel corruption, in which administrators partly direct funds meant for education to increasing their own salaries and hiring lieutenants onto whose shoulders they shift more of the actual workload required to run the institutions they control. This has long been the state of public education from kindergarten through high school; it should be no surprise that the contagion has now spread to public universities.

I suspect that in the case of President Obama's proposal, the devil may be in the details, as it has been in so many of his policies (such as the Affordable Halth Care Act); but in its general outline, we agree with his central idea. If public universities continue unthinkingly to increase the size, wealth, and power of administrations, then they should do so without public money. For the simple matter is that these institutions could never survive if they genuinely had to compete in the educational marketplace. If they had to do so, then they would have to focus upon education and put most of their money to that task: university administrations are free not to do so precisely because they are sheltered from the rough weather of competition by the steady supply of government money. Take that away, and administrators, faced with the choice of extinction or education will either retire or turn their attention to educating students, which will result in leaner administrations and a redressing of the current imbalance of power in favor of faculties. It may be heresy to some whose knees jerk in too reactionary a fashion that President Obama is on the right side of an increasingly important issue, but so he seems to be. We hope that it accrues to our favor to point out that saying so at least causes us considerable pain.

The End of the World

With the approach of 2012, apocalyptic thoughts are in order, not just because of the passing of the old year but also because the next winter solstice will, according to some, bring the end of the world. Throughout history--at least throughout Western history--there has been no shortage of those who propound eschataological theories, and this matter of the Mayan calendar is simply the latest in a very long line which includes the Anglo-Saxon Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, Joachim de Fiore, Karl Marx, and Oswald Spengler, to site some of the more impressive. (One might also name Al Gore, though perhaps he is not quite in Spengler's league.)

I recently came across a very different apocalyptic statement, one which took me quite by surprise because of the the way in which it differs not only from the more sensational predictions found here and there in our culture but also for the way in which its content differs from its title. The title is "A Song on the End of the World," and the whole is a poem by Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. It is found in his volume Ocalenie (Rescue--aptly named, since it was published in 1945), and it runs as follows:

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspouts young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy near the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightening and thunder
Are diasppointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

This poem struck me as a revelation and that for various reasons. First is the drama of the poem itself. On my first reading, I was pruriently drawn in by the title, hoping to find, if not some certain secret gnosis about the end of the world, then at least some information about the eschatological views of a poet I admire. But as one reads through the poem, hoping to find some portentious significance in the bee circling the clover or the yellow-sailed boat approaching the island, one feels growing disappointment and doubt. Both disappointment and doubt are confirmed at the beginning of the third section, in which the poet confesses that you will find no traditional apocalyptic here: in the poet's view, the end of the world consists only of ordinary things, though it is well to note that these ordinary occurrences are all of them suffused with a joy--explicitly in the case of the porpoises and young sparrows and infants being born, more implictly in the glimmering of the net which is growing better under the careful hand of the fisherman.

But the poet goes further still. The final section of the poem gives us a pointed assertion that the traditional accounts of the end of the world are wrong: the end of the world will not come as one grand, climactic event, though such events as the sack of Rome or WWI do indeed occur in human history. No, the summation of all history, the thing that in the end brings clarity and a sense of order to experience is nothing less than existence itself, which, according to the white-haired prophet at the end of the poem, is the most important thing itself. Those philosophical malcontents who wish to see the end of the present order because for them human history is a series of miserable failures better blotted from all consciousness desire a final accounting, in which they, the virtuous, will be recognized by all as having been right all along, while their foes will finally understand in a stunning epiphany that they have lived in darkness and error. For Miłosz, however, the point of human existence is apparently not a matter of meting out justice to the rest of mankind; human existence is something far more wonderful, something that surpasses the ability of any human intelligence to lay hold of, sum up in a phrase or a system, and thus possess (with self-satisfaction) more than can some rival thinker or actor upon this stage of life.

But the poem is not simply a debunking of an overly-dramatic reading of human history. It is also the most wonderful of affirmations. One might expect that a writer who had lived through the Nazi occupation of his beloved homeland and the subsequent invasion by the Soviet Union, one who had by the time he wrote this song expressed himself in an unforgettable poem on the slaughter of the Jews in Poland, one might expect such a writer to long for a final accounting that would bring to book all those perpetrators of titanic evil that flourished in Europe during the middle third of the twentieth century. Instead, however, he delivers a quiet, joyful affirmation of the most common and, dare one say, banal events.

Such an affirmation might well be a puzzle until one reflects again on the title. Our hunger for sensationalism blinds us to the other meaning of the eponymous phrase: "the end of the world," i.e., the purpose of the world, the reason for the world. Here the poet of Catholic sensibilities, one who perhaps heard less at Mass about the final moments in history when Christ will come back to judge the world than about the coming of Christ every day in the bread and wine, seems to point out that the world is indeed instinct at every moment with divine significance. Every event he describes, every happening is a celebration of something that is, a recognition that the Divine Existence has called all things into being and that they are good. In such a view, the myriad, countless beings now on earth and all their riot of vitality serve as evidence of the sheer goodness of God's creation. The purpose of the world, then, its end, is to hold brimful God's creation in all of its magnificent particularity.

In an introduction he wrote many years later to an anthology of poetry that he edited, Miłosz casts the same ideas in prose: "When W.H. Auden says that the poetry 'must praise all it can for being and happening,' he is expressing a theological belief. Affirmation of life has a long, distinguished past in Western thought. Thomas Aquinas' placing of an equal sign between God and pure being belongs here, as does the constant identification of evil with insufficiency of being, by means of which the Devil acts as the power of nothingness. Also in this history is the song of wonder at Nature conceived as the work of the Creator's hands, work which inspired countless painters and supplied a powerful impetus to scholars, at least in the first phase of victoriously ascendant science. 'The Metaphysical Sense of the Wondrousness of Being' means, above all, that contemplating a tree or a rock or a man, we suddenly comprehend that it is, even though it might not have been." ("Against Incomprehensible Poetry" in To Begin Where I Am.)

That calling attention to what is, says Miłosz, is one of the characteristics of good poetry. Homer, I think, would agree, for he is above all the poet of wonderfully specific physical detail, and so would Shakespeare. Anna Akhmatova, who like Miłosz suffered as a poet under a Communist regime, says in a famous line that poetry arises precisely from a jumble of trash. One man's trash, says the old apothegm, is another man's treasure, and thus what Akhmatova surely must mean is that poetry begins in specific experience. On this even the poets of classical China and Japan agree. This affirmation underwrites Miłosz's very fine "Song on the End of the World."

Christopher Hitchens, ctd.

Still thinking about the passing of Christopher Hitchens (an obsession fueled in part by reading through so very many eulogies by so many different people), I recently came across the following paragraph in Czesław Miłosz' essay "Religion and Space," which seems apposite:

"I am not afraid to say that a devout and God-fearing man is superior as a human specimen to a restless mocker who is glad to style himself an 'intellectual,' proud of his cleverness in using ideas which he claims as his own though he acquired them in a pawnshop in exchange for simplicity of heart. Besides, it seems to me that we are born either pious or impious, and I would be glad were I able to number myself among the former. Piety has no need of definition--either it is there or it is not. It persists independently of the division of people into believers and atheists, an illusory division today, since faith is undermined by disbelief in faith, and disbelief by disbelief in itself. The sacred exists and is stronger than all our rebellions--the bread on the table, the rough tree trunk which is, the depths of 'being' I can intuit in the letter opener lying in front of me, entirely steeped and established in its 'being.' My piety would shame me if it meant that I possessed something others did not. Mine, however, is a piety without a home; it survives the obsessive, annihilating image of universal disjointedness and, fortunately, allows me no safe superiority."

Well said (as always with Miłosz) and almost perfectly appropriate to the occasion.

Christopher Hitchens, R.I.P.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the obituaries of Christopher Hitchens with which the press abounds today is the way in which they teem with moving and amusing details of a life fully lived. That certainly is the theme of Hitchens' (awkwardly titled) memoir of a couple of years ago, Hitch-22, a book that is nothing if not a contemporary celebration of Epicureanism--in the best sense of the term. On the more immediate, physical end of the Epicurean spectrum, there are the booze and the smokes, both of which seem to have been ever-present personal accessories. They were not, however, pure affectations, for Hitchens seemed to think them essential to the somewhat bohemian figure he cut among contemporary journalists, a throwback to the adventurer-writers of the early and middle twentieth century, towering figures like George Orwell (whom he adored) railing against oppressive tyrants at a time when people played for keeps. That the booze and cigarettes were both props and something more than props is clear in the photographs from Vanity Fair illustrating Hitchens' stint in the gym conducting research for a series he did on healthy living. The photos show him, cigarette and glass in hand, in a health club, in which he looks as much at home as he would at a Wednesday night prayer meeting in rural Mississippi.

But there is also a higher-end Epicureanism of which he was, once again, one of the principal exponents of our time. For Hitch-22 is also a testimony to friendship, and to the friendship of many of the foremost men of letters of the English-speaking world, such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan. (So enthusiastically does Hitchens testify to friendship that a number of his eulogists in the press today have hastened to point out that they, too, were among the number. Christopher Buckley, for instance, in his obituary on Hitchens for the New Yorker, writes in his usual self-serving way, making clear in his tribute that he knew Hitchens very well indeed.) Hitchens' memoir speaks also of the joys of reading, of writing the well-crafted sentence, of high polemical drama, and of fine conversation. This is indeed the stuff of the high-minded epicure, even as wine, women, and tobacco--all of which abound in Hitch-22--form the dreams of the garden-variety epicures of any time and place.

If Hitchens' life had simply been filled with fun and drama, however, he would have offered little more than entertainment, but like any good work of art, his life gave instruction as well as delight. His best--and defining--quality is his opposition to tyranny in any form, particularly political. His aversion to those who abused power marked him throughout his life, and it does much to explain his opposition to the Vietnam War (which he opposed in part because of the way the young draftees, mostly from the lower classes unable to purchase college deferments, were at the mercy of politicians who to all appearances were more interested in their careers than in the lives of the soldiers). Near the other end of his career, it explains his support for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, since to him American involvement meant the end of a ruthless regime that capriciously, often for its own entertainment, brutally ended the lives of its citizens. And in his case, as in that of his hero Orwell, his firm belief in human freedom and equality proved stronger than his ties to party or his loyalty to any group. One of the most interesting sections of his memoir recounts his journey in 1968 to a Cuban work camp for international supporters of the Castro regime, an experience with which he quickly grew disillusioned when his minders refused to let him wander the country and see for himself how the revolution had remade society. His deepening suspicion of Castro's regime led him to speak out against it, though in the 1960s and early 1970s, support for Castro, as for Mao, was still a shibboleth of the radical left, with which Hitchens had long identified.

Indeed, his willingness to break with colleagues, to risk ostracism by the tribe, is another of his most admirable qualities. Perhaps the best portion of his memoir concerns the events surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. Because the novel is offensive to radical Islamic sensibilities, it earned Rushdie a fatwa from the Aaytollah Khomeni, who placed the author under a sentence of death. Then as now, left-wing artists and writers, those who prided themselves on their transgressive boldness in applauding such desecrations as gained Robert Mapplethorpe his fame in the 1990s, were cowed into silence when confronted with a religion that is willing to answer blasphemy with death. (Even Rushdie himself tried to placate the Islamofascists by issuing an essay in which he claimed that he was, in fact, a believing Muslim.) Hitchens alone stood up to such threats and urged the international community of writers to sign a petition of solidarity with Rushdie. As if to confirm (for the hundredth time) what Mario Vargas Llosa has said about los intellectuales barratos, those who talk a good game about their independence of thought but who can without difficulty be bullied or bought into silence, Hitchens was at first almost alone in this stand. Eventually he persuaded such as Susan Sontag to stand with him, but some, including Arthur Miller (whose Crucible, precisely about how terrible it is for a state to bully its citizens, is supposed to serve as a cautionary tale about the McCarthyism of the 1950s) proved very reluctant indeed. Eventually Hitchens rounded up enough signatories to make a credible show of opposition to Khomeni's censorship, but had it not been for his single-handed efforts, this chilling act of repression would have met no serious response anywhere in the Western world.

Toward the end of his life, Hitchens gained a deal of notoriety for his atheism, which is surely his least attractive quality, though it is in a way related to those traits that made him so admirable. Hitchens was no great philosophical thinker; the stands he took usually issued from the viscera, which is perhaps why he could be so passionately devoted to his causes. Such an m.o. works very well indeed when the topic at hand is the oppression of women under sharia law; it works less well when the topic is the existence of God, a question that has summoned some of the subtlest and most profound philosophical thought in the history of the West. Hitchens was a thorough-going atheist, and as a philosophical matter, atheism is simply untenable. At the very most, a person committed only to the merest logical consideration of the question can be an agnostic, because just as one cannot prove God's existence through logic, so neither can one disprove His existence, either. One can only go so far as to raise serious objections to the arguments for the existence of God, but calling into question His existence does not by any means prove conclusively that He doesn't exist. When Aquinas asserts that the universe must have a creator since everything we see has a cause, one can indeed respond with, "Then who made God?" But this problem with Aquinas' argument does not mean that God does not exist; and to anyone confidently asserting that He is not, one can always ask with Pascal, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" To this question the atheist has no response, nor can he ever have, and thus his confidence that God does not exist is a confidence based on nothing at all. For this reason, Hitchens' insouciance about the matter, though it was of a piece with his more attractive political convictions, was ultimately annoying because he uttered with such conviction assertions about which if he was certain then he was wrong. His commitment in the matter led him at times to foolish extremes, as when, having to defend in debate with Dinesh D'Souza the position that religion poisons everything, he explained away the horrors of the atheist regimes by using the utter sophism that Naziism and Communism were deeply religious at their core. Much better to have conceded uncertainty on the big question and not therefore have felt himself required to utter nonsense on the subsidiary points.

Had he done so, however, had he been more philosophically modest, he would not have been Hitch, the embodiment of common sense, whose instinctive understanding of right and wrong endowed his commitments not only with wit but with a strong emotional force. That emotional force, which runs throughout a rich and colorful life, animated his politics for good and his metaphysics for ill. May he rest in peace.