Publishers and conservatives

Harry Stein muses on The Future of Conservative Books (City Journal, Summer 2008). That would be nonfiction books.

Side note: what the publishing industry (at the mammoth levels) and I call "conservative" aren't always the same thing. If I were in charge, verbal assaults would have to be called something else.

Stein has a nice overview of how big publishing houses are generally at odds with conservatives, even to the point of failing to promote books they might agree to publish, or somehow not getting around to printing enough books to meet demand should demand pop up despite their neglect. And it's not just the publishers. He also looks at the press, and trade publications, which tend to ignore those non-PC titles they don't savage. Conservatives have to work around these obstacles, which can be substantial.

hat tip: Phil at Brandywine Books

Robert Penn Warren on "Relevance"

Back in 1971, the Intercollegiate Review published an essay by Robert Penn Warren, which is republished at First Principles, and (so the lead-in to the article states) in the book Arguing Conservatism: Four Decades of the Intercollegiate Review (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008).

The essay ties together a range of topics, from literature to language to poetry to comments on the times and philosophy. An excerpt:

The most obvious question concerning literature is: What subject matter is appropriate for our time? Almost a hundred and fifty years ago, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne sat in an upper room, totally withdrawn from the real world, and wrote stories. No doubt writing stories was bad enough, but his stories were about the distant past. Later on, still brooding over the past, Hawthorne moved to Concord. But there he had a neighbor who was really relevant. The neighbor certainly didn’t write stories, he told people how to live, and he took a very dim view of the past. He was a prophet with a crystal ball and his crystal ball did, as a matter of fact, show some important things about the future. It seems only natural that Hawthorne did not think very highly of his prophet neighbor, any more than the neighbor did of him. Hawthorne and Emerson met on the wood paths of Concord, and passed on, Emerson with his head full of bright futurities and relevances, Hawthorne with his head full of the irrelevant past. As Henry James was to say of them: “Emerson, as a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could have attached but a moderate value to Hawthorne’s catlike faculty of seeing in the dark.”

We revere Emerson, the prophet whose prophecies came true. But having once come true, those prophecies began to come untrue. More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past. And what the cat’s eye of Hawthorne saw gave him the future—and relevance. He died more than a century ago, but we find in his work a complex, tangled, and revolutionary vision of the soul, which we recognize as our own. Emerson spoke nobly about relevance but Hawthorne was relevant.

The moral is that it is hard to tell at any given moment what is relevant. The thing so advertised is likely to be as unrelated to reality as the skirt length is to the construction of the female anatomy. To be relevant, to change our metaphor, merely to a symptom and not to the disease. The question is not that of the topicality of a subject. It is that of the writer’s own grounding in his time, the relation of his sensibility to his time, and paradoxically enough, of his resistance to his time. For there must be resistance, and the good work is always the drama of the writer’s identity with, and struggle against, his time. John Milton was in the profoundest way a man of the 17th century, but writing Paradise Lost, under the reign of Charles II, was he in tune with his time?

Cult building 101

I agree with the people who think that this video is creepy. I agree with Bookworm that it reminds me a bit too much of the methods used by totalitarian leaders (not to mention other personality cults through the ages).

It's a shame, because the kids are really talented, especially the little girl who opens and closes. But what sort of parent plunks a child into this kind of leader-worship and applauds and hugs them for doing so well at it? (And are the grown-ups a bit blissed out for you in this video? Or is it just me?)

And why, pray tell, should I vote one way or another based upon the performance of persons too young to know what they're singing about? Why should anybody?

What is it with the Dems this year, with their repeated shift to the playground for spokesmen?

P.S. I shared this with a man I consider very wise, and one of the things he said is that he thought a bunch of those kids are going to look back on this with a great deal of embarrassment. To say the least.

I have to wonder how many of them, years from now, will look back on this project with at least a touch of resentment. I have a number of things in my youth and young adulthood that I've decided were best recanted, or apologized for, or otherwise filed under 'well-meant but ill-founded' - but they were my mistakes, not something my parents got me into. Whatever shortcomings my all-too-human parents had, using me to promote some agenda wasn't one of them, nor did they make the mistake of promoting me to an equal status with adults, when I was too young and ignorant and inexperienced and impressionable to hold my own with adults.

Added: Ed Morrissey says it better than most. And succinctly, too.

I'm with him. Leave the kids out of it, please.

Discontent

Nancy Ann at Femina looks at the difference between contentment and discontent.

Somewhere along the way I came to pretty much the same conclusions. Thank goodness. I see people who haven't figured it out, and they're not as happy as they might be.

hat tip: PalmTree Pundit

Margaret Thatcher's legacy (and, an art question)

The June 2008 Imprimis features a look at Margaret Thatcher's achievements and legacy, presented by John O'Sullivan, the author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

An excerpt (reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College):

When Lady Thatcher revived the British economy, she was reviving profound social virtues that the British had once exemplified to the world—the Thatcherite “vigorous virtues” described above. In 1979, they seemed utterly destroyed by 50 years of statism and socialism. In fact, they had merely been driven underground by government over-regulation and intervention.

As James C. Bennett has observed, it took only a few years of Lady Thatcher’s application of free market solutions for these virtues to become vigorous again. Once that happened, it took only a few more years for those revived virtues to transform Britain from the sick man of Europe into the world’s fourth largest economy.

Deep social patterns can rarely be extirpated altogether. Cultural transformations of nations and societies imposed by governments nearly always fail in the long run. The old ways only look dead; in reality, they are merely dormant. They are the resources of our civilization and they can be revived to meet new challenges.

If Lady Thatcher demonstrated that truth in matters economic, she believes today that the resources of the Anglo-American political tradition of ordered liberty are not exhausted either. She believes that the virtues of that tradition—dispersed authority, open debate, popular sovereignty, spontaneous social evolution—are not dead, merely dormant. Indeed, they are flourishing in those new democracies, such as Estonia and Poland, where they have been introduced since 1989 (and where economic success is far more obvious than in countries that have clung to more centralized models). They are flourishing too in the English-speaking world outside Britain—notably in the U.S., Australia, and a reforming India. And they offer the best hope for Third World countries emerging from poverty and backwardness into a world of globalized opportunities.

Ironically, however, these virtues are threatened in Britain by growing statist regulation under New Labour; by the nation’s absorption into a European political structure built upon a very different tradition of constructivist rationalism; and by the failure of many conservatives to see the dangers in a European and global governance that lacks democratic accountability and threatens liberal freedoms.

A side note: the speech from which the article is adapted was given at the dedication of the first statue of Margaret Thatcher to be erected in the United States. It's not the sort of statue I'm used to, for major world leaders. But perhaps the informality will grow on me? Perhaps there will be a trend in seated statues, and it won't seem so strange? It's not that I dislike it, you understand, but I'm not sure that I much like it, either. Give me a while to get used to it, and then I'll decide what I think.

I do like the quote on the plaque with it, as recounted in the article linked just above:

Sculpted by Bruce Wolfe, the statue is over six feet in height and depicts Thatcher sitting in a pensive posture. A plaque on its base includes a quote from a 1990 Thatcher speech:

"The new world of freedom into which the dazzled Socialists have stumbled is not new to us. What to them is uncharted territory is to us familiar and well loved ground. For Britain has returned to those basic truths and principles which made her great—personal liberty, private property and the rule of law, on which democratic freedoms everywhere are based. Ours is a creed which travels and endures. Its truths are written in the human heart."

If anyone can find links to pictures of the other statues made for Hillsdale's Liberty Walk I'd appreciate it. It's nothing more than idle curiosity on my part, but I want to see how George Washington and Winston Churchill are depicted, compared to Thatcher. And I guess there's a Thomas Jefferson statue coming later this year? How's he posed, I wonder?

(Pause while I try googling a few more search phrases...) Semi-success! Here's a picture of the model of the Churchill statue, but I don't know if they really went with this idea. It's not your typical heroic stance, either, but I kind of like it. Sort of. (Again, I think I need some time to adjust to it, or something.)

I don't want to spend any more time on this just now, but if you stumble across links for photos of the other statues, please drop a note in the comments. For that matter, I'd be interested in evidence that this somewhat informal style is (or isn't) a wider trend in public sculptures of famous people. (Certainly the recently unveiled statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh isn't along those lines.) Thanks.

Link likes: On the Square, at First Things

The bloggers over at the On The Square blog are turning out some thoughtful and thought-provoking posts, on the whole. (They usually do, in my experience.)

For instance: The Red Planet, by Joseph Bottom, which manages to combine discussions of science fiction and biotechnology, but not in a way you'd probably assume. It comes with a good dash of philosophy, too, and some history. For those of you in the pro-life movement who are concerned about the human rights abuses of some branches of biotech, you might want to consider his statement: "We make a mistake, I think, when we call the worst claims of modern biotechnology a revivified form of the old eugenics." Follow the link if you want to know why he says that, and what he thinks we should call it instead.

For instance: Stork Economics, by James Kerian, in which zero-sum economics is likened to the idea many children have that storks bring babies. It's a cute way of taking on the idea that wealth isn't created, but can only be transferred. It has some practical applications, too, I think.

For instance: The Giving Society, by Michael Novak, in which it is argued that many of the obvious differences between the United States and Europe aren't due to Americans being "Individualists" quite as much as to the fact that Americans are far more prone to give of their time and their money to personally help others.

For instance: The Human Experience, by Amanda Shaw, which tells of a soon-to-released documentary which focuses on the strength of spirit of physically, mentally, and spiritually battered individuals. It's a heart-rending read, but inspiring, too.

For instance: Understanding the Third Reich and Other Great Evils, by Richard John Neuhaus, which happens to be the post I was going back to reread when I got sidetracked by the others linked above... He uses some books on the Holocaust as a jumping off place, and has some interesting observations. Jumping in midstream, and leaving off before the end, there's this:

During the Third Reich, ordinary Germans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a chilling phrase. We might easily say, and many do all too easily say, that during the era of slavery or during current horrors such as the genocide in Sudan or the daily killing of thousands of unborn children in the abortuaries around the country, most ordinary Americans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a moralistic cheap shot. The truth is that we all have many more things on our minds, and necessarily so. Such as families, jobs, dealing with sickness, and warding off despair. Not to mention, for many, the distinctly unnecessary hours every day spent surfing and chatting on the blogosphere.

The Third Reich is rightly viewed as an icon of evil. This does not mean, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, that the ordinary Germans of the time are the icon of moral indifference or complicity in great evil. Then it was the Jews, the Slavs, and the gypsies. At other times, it is another class of human beings. Given the requisite mix of circumstances, which is not beyond imagination, it is an idle conceit to think that ordinary Americans would behave more nobly than did the Germans of Hitler’s day. Among any people of any time, moral courage is the exception and not the rule. There are heroes and heroines who contend against the great evils of their time, but even they must be selective. You may be devoting your life to helping the people of Sudan, but what are you doing to help prisoners of conscience in China, or to stop international sex trafficking, or to feed the hungry of Zimbabwe, or to relieve the loneliness of old people in the nursing home within an easy drive from your home? The list goes on and on.

Fighting "anti-science" charges against conservatives

At The Point: An Artful Response To The Anti-Science Rap?, J. Clinton is asking for discussion on the central points in Science Without Experiments by Jim Manzi (NRO, June 12, 2008).

Teacher as midwife

S. M. Hutchens considers the ways and purposes of teaching, and compares traditional methods with 'progressive alternatives'.

He uses his daughter's training as an instrumental music teacher as the launching pad, and notes that as a music teacher she has some advantages over some of her academic colleagues (not least that "she will be working in a context where any advance on what is written is known by everyone present to be a mistake, and not only a mistake, but a mistake that makes everyone look bad").

Fear of suffering and the culture of death

Jennifer F. has opened a discussion about Fear of suffering and the culture of death.

Progressives versus Puritans

From the essay "Puritans and Historians" by Mark A. Noll in the book Christianity in America: A Handbook, c. 1983 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, published by Lion Publishing, Herts, England:

Only in the last century has "Puritan" become a synonym for joyless, repressive, and often hypocritical fanaticism. This interpretation arose during the Progressive Era of American history when so many intellectuals felt so confident about understanding the real roots of human behavior, which they deemed to be largely economic and psychological, and when they were hailing so surely the march of civilization from superstitious darkness to democratic light. The carnage of World War I, the moral crisis of the 1920s, and the economic collapse of the 1930s disabused most scholars of the idea that they were living in a new Golden Age. These shocks also created a climate in which the Puritans, who had understood something of human evil, the complexity of human existence, and the deeply engrained longing for the divine, could be studied more objectively. Yet the popular image of Puritanism created by the Progressives lingers on...

Which science fiction film...

... has the most realistic vision of the future of mankind? Half a hundred academic sorts studied the question, and voted for ....

Well, let Phil from Brandywine Books give you the lead-in and the link.

Living Weak

If you can't live strong, you can "live weak," and it has its rewards, says Bill Stuntz (who has occasion to know).

Hat tip: Wittingshire, which got me to Stuntz's blog with this post.

Modern smelling salts

Just down the road, a woman is missing and presumed drowned. The radio news reports have warned people that the chances of stumbling across a corpse are pretty high just now, and also assure us that people with property along the river downriver have been notified personally. It's an awful situation, but so far nobody I've heard of has taken to running around screaming that they shouldn't be expected to deal with something like this, or that they'll never recover from the experience.

You are scratching your head over that last statement? I don't blame you. Normal people absorb news like this and deal with it at least after a fashion, normally. They search, they grieve, they make sure the lady's horses and dogs don't starve or die of thirst. They don't expect, or claim, that they'll never get over it.

Don't misunderstand me. I don't mean to give short shrift to the heartache, the grief, or the horror involved, especially for whoever winds up dealing with the remains (assuming the lady is, in fact, drowned). My heart goes out to her family, her neighbors, the search and rescue people, her friends. She was an acquaintance of ours, a bookstore customer, somebody I didn't socialize with but did chat with when our paths crossed. I am, myself, somewhat shocked and sick over the whole situation.

It probably doesn't help any that a week and a half ago we buried one of my favorite people on Earth, and that a couple days after that I found out that a very nice young man in our community is terminally ill. To make it worse, he and his very nice young wife are the very picture of devotion. But I guess that's part of my point. If you live in a community, as opposed to off in your own little world, you run into this sort of heartache all the time. Frequency doesn't make it easy. It doesn't make it seem normal. It is, truly, heartache. Tragic. Difficult. Painful. But it is, for all that, surprisingly common. And it doesn't ruin you for life. It might - perhaps should - stagger you for a bit (would you rather be heartless?), but it doesn't ruin you for life, especially if you have the decency to pitch in to help those staggered more by the calamity than yourself. (It helps to know you've done something, for one thing. And you can draw on the strength of others if you only work beside them. Etc.)

But here's the deal (I am coming to the "modern smelling salts" business, really...). In college, I remember, my friends and I read in the newspaper about someone finding the body of a woman who had been dead a few days, and we sat around claiming to each other that we'd never recover from finding a body that had been dead a few days. Never.

In hindsight, I can see we did that sort of thing rather a lot. We were never going to get over this or that or the other thing. I don't know where the grown-ups were: whether they didn't catch us at this sort of nonsense, or didn't care, or thought it was cute, or considered it harmless. Harmless, my foot. If you practice thinking of yourself as fragile, and breakable, and unable to recover from circumstances, how can you expect to become strong, and steady, and resilient - or reliable, for that matter?

We also used to sit around and feel superior to those delicate damsels of older days who reportedly swooned at the least provocation, expecting someone to fish out the smelling salts and revive them.

We should not have laughed at them, I think. I think, really, that we were more like them than we knew. And in some ways we were their inferiors. The oh-so-refined ladies did, after all, recover from their swoons. We were practicing, on the other hand, to never get over whatever had prompted us to have a case of the vapors. To never forget. To never heal completely.

The oh-so-refined ladies of yesteryear, moreover, weren't asking for more than personal attention. We had an unfortunate tendency to think the world ought to be changed to protect our fragile selves. Not that we considered ourselves fragile. I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar was a big song about then, and we could be caught, now and then, belting out I am strong, I am invincible, etc.

Who were we trying to kid, I wonder? If we had been strong, if we had been confident (never mind 'invincible'), would we have championed abortion? Affirmative action? Punishment for clubs that only admitted men? Would speech codes have even come up as a subject? Hate crime legislation was over the horizon yet; but it's the same sort of thing, isn't it?

I look around, and a lot of what's going on in society, in popular culture, and at the government level seems to me nothing more or less than people (generally people who have practiced modern variations on swooning until it is second nature to them) getting the vapors (right on cue, very often, it seems to me), and somebody rushing to provide them with (mostly harmful) variations on those old smelling salts, whether it be legislation, lawsuits, or optional medical procedures, or what have you. We have 'progressed', you see, from individual swoons, to group ones, whenever possible. Or at least some folks have.

The gentility is lacking, but I still think it's the same thing. Oh, this is too much for little ol' me! the lady exclaims, collapsing in a heap. And somebody rushes to the rescue, playing along, instead of (which might be more sensible, and perhaps better for everyone in the long run) saying, "Oh, for crying out loud, stop being hysterical."

Art thieves (of a sort)

Regarding suicide, from a Christian point of view, isn't it to some degree something like a curator taking a beautiful and priceless painting out of a museum and tossing it in the trash because he's tired of it or has come to think it's ugly (or is tired of guarding it, or of dusting it, or whatever)? In both cases, something precious and unique is destroyed. In both cases, untold numbers of people ('the public' in the one case, 'the communion of saints living and dead' in the other) are deprived of something that would have blessed them had it been left where it was supposed to be.

Disclaimer: As with all such things on this blog, if the illustration doesn't help you, please ignore it. I hardly speak for Christianity around here. I'm just a standard issue middle-aged lady with a computer and an internet connection. (And the sort of mind that pops out questions like this...)

Fashionable = ?

Does it ever surprise you how many people seem to confuse faddish with fashionable, fashionable with sophisticated, sophisticated with savvy, and savvy with more than it is?

Just asking.

The 20 weeks campaign

In the UK:

On 6 May Nadine Dorries MP launched the official parliamentary campaign to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. The matter will come to the vote when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is debated in the Commons later this month...

Visit the 20 weeks campaign website for more information. For those of you in the UK, there's a petition to sign, if you'd like.

hat tip: Anglican Mainstream

Green before green was hip (and lost its bearings)

Sheila Wray Gregoire writes about living 'green' without being a green fanatic. If only the fanatics would listen, I think a lot of people could be spared a whole lot of grief, up to and including needless starvation.

hat tip: SFO Mom

Young adults rejecting the brokenness they were raised in

From CitizenLink: 'Millennial' Generation Shows Respect for Traditional Values:

The media portray "millennials" as self-absorbed slackers. But according to a new poll, these twentysomethings show a lot of respect for traditional values.

The survey, by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, found 94 percent respect parenthood and 84 percent have great esteem for marriage. Just a quarter said they respect Hollywood.

Ann Mack, a spokeswoman for the agency, said she was surprised by the findings.

“It could be because they are more idealistic as a generation," she said, "but it could be because they are so young and not yet jaded.”

Mark Johnson works with B2G (better2gether), a ministry of the Navigators for twentysomethings. He believes the younger generation is reacting to something.

“At least half of them that we see have come out of some kind of dysfunctional or broken home," he said. "They are wanting something more or better than what they have come from.”

Steve Watters, director of young adults at Focus on the Family, said he was encouraged by the numbers and is looking for ways to tap into that potential through Focus' Boundless ministry to twentysomethings.

“It’s something we want to encourage as much as possible," he said, "realizing that they are not going to find that kind of support from Hollywood or Madison Avenue."

Now, this article doesn't mention anything about the poll's size, or how it was conducted. For that matter, if you've read here very long you know I don't usually put much stock in polls, even large ones that are well conducted.

On the other hand, for what it's worth, I've noticed young adults putting a premium on marriage, on family, on community, on service, and, in many cases, on military service. There are a surprising number of really wonderful young people these days. You might not know it to look at them (have you had something of a tattoo epidemic in your area?!), but when you stop to talk to them, or look at what they're doing, it can be both impressive and reassuring. A lot of them seem to have thought long and hard about what's important, and are willing to make commitments.

(P.S. Speaking of 'Hollywood,' did you see this over in the annex?)

Rudyard Kipling remembered

Roger Kimball takes a look at Kipling, poetry, civilization, literary figures and liberals in Rudyard Kipling unburdened (The New Criterion, April 2008).

hat tip: Peter Schramm

Expectations and divisions

From On patience: the West vs. Islamicist totalitarianism (neo-neocon, April 11, 2008):

Our post-9/11 unity was fleeting, if not totally illusory. We are now bitterly divided on how to fight the war against Islamicist totalitarianism.

We are divided on whether there is such a war. We are divided on who our most important enemies in that war might be. We are even divided on whether we truly have what we might call enemies, or whether a nice friendly dialogue might not be enough to make us all get along better.

But on reading this article by Clfford D. May in National Review entitled “100 Years of War?”—a reference to Barack Obama’s distortion of John McCain’s remark that we might need to keep troops in Iraq for that long a time, similar to what we’re already doing in Germany and South Korea—it occurred to me that there is another division, and that this division might actually be the heart of the matter.

This split may have begun to occur as early as 9/11 itself, shortly after the towers fell. It has to do with the perception of how long we should expect this fight to take. The division is between those who always assumed it would be long and arduous, and those who did not.

Read the whole thing. It's a thoughtful piece, backed by some history.

I count myself in the "assumed it would be long and arduous" camp.