Roger Lewis - Modernist, Moralist and Wit

by Stephen Masty

Roger Lewis

British author Roger Lewis is adored by a small coterie of true conservative modernists and, it seems, despised by a much larger body of chatterati, mediacrats and the Leftist cultural mafia. Such polar reactions to this literary moralist, innovative biographer and wicked satirist explain much about the UK’s culture wars, so changed since the first half of the twentieth century. Parallels may also be drawn with American media-culture and public values.

Lewis, a 52-year-old Welshman transplanted to England, resembles a Victorian mill producing industrial quantities of good reviews, academic articles, biographies and satire. Most of the works by this former Oxford don, who has first-class degrees and honours from St. Andrews, Magdalen and Wolfson, are hallmarked by his distinctive modernism overlaying a vigorous conservatism, together reminiscent of T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.

Like both, he is a revolutionary traditionalist who couples modern art-forms with timeless values: a concept understood by imaginative conservatives, not fully comprehended by their hidebound kinsmen who retreat from modernism in any form, and often loathed by what Lenin would today call Brit-culture’s Leftist true-believers, fellow-travellers from the BBC and similar media, and the useful-idiots of the unthinking chattering classes; in other words, much of the UK’s cultural Establishment.

Lewis has single-handedly reinvented the literary and show-business biography with his innovative lives of Sir Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers, Charles Hawtrey and Anthony Burgess, turning an age-old formula into works of modern art.

The very structure and style of each biography is tailored to his subject, reflecting how modern media figures create their own personae for professional and personal gain, and how, ultimately, the audience’s and the biographer’s perceptions contribute just as much to our understanding of these half-real-half-concocted figures as do the conventional dates and details of their professional and personal lives. A Lewis biography, echoing Yeats, will not “separate the dancer from the dance.”

The First Principles Of Monetary Policy

by Brian Domitrovic

What is the set of principles behind the government’s conduct of monetary policy? It’s a hard question to answer. The Constitution gives the United States the power “to coin money” and “regulate the value thereof” and to fix exchange rates with respect to foreign coin. But clearly, the Federal Reserve has moved far beyond this little rubric as goes the basis of its operations. “Price stability in the context of full employment,” “smoothing out booms and busts,” “making an orderly environment for federal financing,” “being the lender of last resort,” “talking away the punch bowl before the party gets going,” “preventing another Great Depression”—these are the guiding lights, real winners all of them, you hear about when it comes to our central bank.

And what do we get? A banking system gorged with reserves, and an economic growth rate desperate for 2% coming out of a deep, dark recession. Where’d we go wrong?

A Liberal Wolf in Communal Clothing

by Bradley C. S. Watson

The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism, by Bruce Frohnen, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Community and Tradition: Conservative Perspectives on the American Experience, edited by George W. Carey and Bruce Frohnen, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

Communitarianism at one level is a contemporary school of thought that takes to task liberalism as a political theory. As such, one might expect communitarianism to be in fundamental sympathy with conservative critiques of liberalism. But such is not necessarily the case. The communitarians constitute an eclectic group, including among their number Harvard government professor Michael Sandel, Maryland political theorist William Galston, McGill philosopher Charles Taylor, George Washington sociologist Amitai Etzioni, and Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah. All share the view that individuals are constituted by a complex set of communal attachments and dispositions and that any attempt to describe human beings as outgrowths of an abstract, individualist “state of nature” are fundamentally misleading and doomed to failure.

Communitarianism as practical social philosophy, as distinct from academic theory, has, over the past ten to fifteen years, been reinvigorated as a result of the perception that America in particular is a nation whose individualism has gotten out of control. Everything from high illegitimacy rates to poverty to criminal conduct tends to be ascribed by “political’’ communitarians to individuals’ lack of grounding in community norms and aspirations. This lack of grounding is furthered by the liberal state’s official neutrality on questions of the moral good. In the absence of non-neutral norms, people-especially youths-are left with nothing but nihilistic value-positing, defended by nothing more than tabloid television’s seemingly ubiquitous, if implicit, question: Who is to say what is right and wrong? These unconstrained individuals therefore do not have benefit of their community’s salutary proscriptions, or their forefathers’ practical wisdom. Their alienation from anything other than the politics of the self leaves them vacuously unencumbered-free in a world where freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Self-Government Requires Self-Governing Citizens

During the first four decades of the American Republic, the irascible William Findley was the leading state politician of the Western Pennsylvania backcountry. He had seen action as a captain in the American Army during the Revolution, was an outspoken Antifederalist during the state's ratifying convention, and was a persistent critic of both state and national public finances. Many a high-born Philadelphian of the likes of Robert Morris and James Wilson, crossed swords with William Findley, only to come away with a healthy respect for his tenacity and shrewd political sense. It came as little surprise that Findley would write the definitive critique of the first administration's handling of the western counties' resistance to the federal excise tax on whiskey in the early 1790s. In that work Findley felt compelled to remind his readers that America was not great because of those in power or because of its “privileged orders,” but derived its “dignity and importance, through the natural and honorable channels of prudence and industry.” These were not political qualities, but social values of individual responsibility and integrity. Government in America was not their source. They sprang from the people through their own private and civil associations. But when government exercised power badly it threatened to break up those “natural and honorable channels.” State and society were not the same. It was not so long ago that this distinction was still part of the American understanding. 

Pat Buchanan on Suicide of a Superpower

Below is an excellent interview with Pat Buchanan on his book Suicide of a Superpower.

The Inspired Wisdom of Burke

by George A. Panichas

Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, by Russell Kirk, with a Foreword by Roger Scruton, Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997.

Russell Kirk’s book on Edmund Burke, first published in 1967, now revised and handsomely re-issued, testifies not only to the “enduring Burke,” but also to the enduring Kirk. As a British statesman and political philosopher of “inspired wisdom,” Burke (1729-1797) continues to address our time and condition. And as an American man of letters, Kirk (1918-1994) fully possesses the critical and sapiential acumen-and the sympathy of vision-to elucidate Burke’s life and thought. In essence this book serves an introduction to the meaning and importance of Burke’s achievement. Indeed Kirk’s book, in its clarity of expression, its illumination of ideas, its cogency of organization and development, exemplifies standards that a critical study, if it is to have lasting value, has to satisfy. At the same time, its conveyed insight and wisdom make it far more than an introduction, and give it an added critical dimension. Unpretentious and straightforward, and with an impelling honesty of approach and interpretation, this book has the wonderful ability to guide a reader through the most significant and intricate avenues of Burke’s contribution.

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

by Stratford Caldecott

The sequel to Beauty for Truth's Sake has been published by Angelico Press. Called Beauty in the Word, it completes the retrieval of the seven liberal arts begun in the earlier book by examining the first three, the "Trivium", which Dorothy L. Sayers made the basis of Classical Education in her famous essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning." But this book tries to go further than Sayers.

New opportunities for school reform, and the creation of Academy schools and Free schools comparable to American Charter schools, encourage radical thinking about education. We need a philosophy that can guide us as we found these new schools, or enrich and improve existing schools, or attempt to design a curriculum for teaching our children at home. The curriculum has become fragmented and incoherent because we have lost any sense of how all knowledge fits together. What kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing a sense of the whole, or a sense of the sacred? We must make an effort to overcome in ourselves false ideas inculcated by the education that we ourselves received, before we can understand the elements that would make a better education possible for our children.

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson

by James W. Ely, Jr.

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer,  University Press of Virginia, 1994    

Thomas Jefferson continues to fascinate scholars. A voluminous literature examines his long public career and extensive comments on political issues. Historians have shown particular interest in exploring the elusive philosophical underpinnings of Jefferson’s political persuasions. David N. Mayer makes a valuable contribution to this debate with his comprehensive study of Jefferson’s constitutional principles as they matured from the 1760s to the 1820s.

Mayer identifies three sources that shaped Jefferson’s thinking about constitutional questions. From the English Whig tradition, Jefferson derived the notion of a constitution as a check on the power of government in order to protect individual rights. The federal aspect of his thought emphasized the division of governmental authority into state and national spheres, each of which was further divided into distinct executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Jefferson also gave special weight to the republican character of government, in which governmental authority rested on popular sovereignty and majority rule. Mayer points out that Jefferson’s constitutionalism developed over time and was often influenced by the course of political events. Rejecting criticism that Jefferson as president did not always act in conformity with his previously articulated views, the author maintains that Jefferson’s use of power was remarkably consistent with his constitutional theory.

Football über alles!

by John Willson

John J. Miller, The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football (Harper, 2011)

“Of all these sports,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1893, “there is no better sport than football.”  As in many things, TR was on the cutting edge of cultural opinion in the United States as it was about to takes its place among the powers of the world.  That he too often conflated football and world politics is perhaps an unintended message of this very enjoyable book. 

Sports are inherently conservative.  They confront human nature directly.  Harvey Penick, one of the great golf teachers of all time, decided in the 1930s not to try the professional tour after he watched Sam Snead hit a few balls.  No amount of determination can account for Michael Jordan (who my mother was convinced is a reincarnation of Shaka Zulu), or the great Jim Brown, whom I encountered in an elevator in 1961.  About ten years ago, killing time in the airport at O’Hare, I chanced into Terry Bradshaw walking along trying to be inconspicuous, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans with holes, carrying a beat-up duffel bag.  I had seen him play many times, of course, and as a commentator.  In life he is massive. His arms are too long, and his hands could encircle a good sized watermelon; his jaw alone could provide bone meal for a small garden.  These men are not ordinary, and what they are cannot be taught, manufactured, or legislated (for or against).  Paul Azinger famously said that there are very few Democrats on the PGA Tour.

Ethical Labor

by Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk

Thirty years ago, Irving Babbitt wrote that the highest order of true work is an ethical working, labor of the spirit; and that no important problem of economics or politics can be solved within its own terms. "When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical, problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem." Now for almost the whole of the twentieth century, the study called ethics has been abandoned to Dr. Dryasdust, degraded to a subject abstract and often purely semantic, dully lectured upon in decaying departments of philosophy at universities dedicated to material aggrandizement. Here and there a stubborn man or an old-fashioned college stood out against this neglect of the most humane of the sciences; but by and large, the sterile "ethics" of Bentham or of Dewey, grubbing in the dust of barbarous vocabulary and arid generalization, have smothered the Aristotelian tradition. Many clergymen, even, have confounded the science of ethics with a dim creed of "service" or with moralizing. The world, taking the hereditary guardians of Ethics at their own valuation, was prompt to assume that ethics somehow was a vestige of systematized primitive conventions, or a bookish conspiracy to restrain the natural heartiness and freedom of man; and, in the absence of any convincing alternative (for every age must be saddled with Ethics, whether it knows this truth or not), the world reverted to an ethical principal still more nearly primitive than tribal convention, "That they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can." Two tremendous explosions, subsequently and consequently, have suggested to some of us that ethical studies need to be undertaken on a plane higher than this.

What Holds America Together?

by Robert Speaight

The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk.
[Revised edition: ISI 2003, 534 pages]

 

The President of a great American university told me not long ago that most of his students shared the opinion of Mr. Henry Ford: history was “bunk.” They would not have said that about heredity, which is supposed to unload the sins of the children upon the fathers, and cheerfully to leave them there.

Yet history, read as what has mattered and not only as what has happened, is simply another name for heredity. This important book by Dr. Russell Kirk is a study in the heredity of the United States. Its publication at a time when America is preparing to celebrate the bicentenary of its independence is a significant event. No doubt we shall be hearing a good deal about the American “revolution,” but Dr. Kirk shows convincingly that no revolution was less revolutionary than the War of Independence. The last thing the Patriots of the Thirteen Colonies wanted was to turn things upside down; all they wanted was to leave them as they were, but in the hands of a capable English gentleman called George Washington instead of an incapable English king called George III.

Mexico Way

by John Willson

Mexico Way (by Chilton Williamson, Jr.; Chronicles Press, 2008)

This is a way cool novel, as several of my grand daughters would say. Chilton Williamson, Jr. who grew up in the wilds of New York City and after many missed steps found himself to be a cowboy, is one of the best writers that too few people know about.

Mexico Way is about almost redemption. The character is “Samuel Adams White, retired inspector with the United States Customs Bureau.” His wife dumps him: “I think that you are the most boring human being I’ve known ever.” And then he gets kidnapped by Mexican drug-runners because he had made a stupid mistake and offended their honor.

He knew very little about Mexico before his abduction, despite working along the border for an entire career. In that sense he is a metaphor for most Americans, and he learns the hard way.

Books & Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution

by John Willson

Winston has asked me to review books for TIC, and to ask you to help me with this project. I read hardcover books, softcover books, Kindle books, little kids’ books (one of my favorites is Reynard the Fox); almost anything that comes into my hands. We might have a small budget to get the right books into the hands of the right persons. I will be the monarch of that domain. We must review books that Winston Elliott and Brad Birzer would like, or that I would tell them they like.

Here is the first one.

Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, by Mary Eberstadt (Ignatius Press, 2012)

The conclusion of this wonderful and difficult book is that Humanae Vitae got it all right. I don’t know Mary Eberstadt, but she writes like an angel, and so I would like to call her and say, “Thank you.”

An Excerpt from: James Madison and the Making of America

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

James Madison, Jr. entered the world at midnight of the night of March 16-17, 1751.[1] By chance, he was an American prince.

James Madison, Sr., the master of Montpellier in Piedmont Virginia’s semi-frontier Orange County, was the wealthiest man in the county. His lands were extensive, his slaveholdings were notable, and his family connections were impressive. In a society that privileged the wealthy to a notable degree, James, Jr.’s world was his oyster.

Piedmont Virginia lay west of the Tidewater region that had been dominated by Virginia planters for well over a century. Life was cruder there, and tradition less powerful. Social status figured very strongly in a young man’s life, but not to the degree that it did in the coastal counties. If James Madison, Jr. ever experienced having a common Virginian doff his hat as young Madison passed, then, he was not quite so snobbish as a Byrd, Carter, or Harrison. Still, like them, Madison knew his place.

James Madison and the Making of America

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Kevin Gutzman’s James Madison and the Making of America takes what we thought was a familiar story and gives it a fresh and important interpretation that challenges old orthodoxies and helps us better understand important episodes in American history.

For instance, proper credit for the world-historic Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is at last granted not to its draftsman, Thomas Jefferson – who had his gravestone list the statute along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia as his proudest achievements – but to James Madison, who actually managed to get the statute enacted (and who would have nothing inscribed on his gravestone).

New Book: Forgotten Conservatives in American History

by Winston Elliott III

I am looking forward to reviewing this promising new book, Forgotten Conservatives in American History, by Brion McClanahan and Clyde N. Wilson. For now a teaser from the publisher is offered to our readers.

“Americans weary of what passes for ‘conservatism’ in the circus of modern party politics owe McClanahan and Wilson profound thanks for recovering these voices of a lost tradition. Our bloated, debt-ridden, crusading empire has never needed these courageous defenders of the old republic more than it does at present. This is a sober reminder of how far we have departed from first principles and points to the quality of character needed for recovery of authentic conservatism.”—Richard M. Gamble, author of In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth

Humanizing the Social Sciences

by Gerald J. Russello

Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore, by Peter L. Berger. Prometheus Books, 2011.

Sociology was invented in the nineteenth century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who envisioned a “science of society” in which religion was replaced by rationalism and the polity was ruled by experts. Comte intended the discipline to be a new “religion of humanity” and an instrument to further radical political ends. Yet the career of Peter Berger, one of America’s best-known sociologists, shows that the discipline need not be ideological or anti-religious, and that the study of society can be as humanistic as it is social-scientific.

Mr. Berger is best known for The Sacred Canopy (1967), which critiques what is known as the “secularization thesis,” the theory, promoted by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim (among many others), that as societies modernize, they necessarily secularize. Mr. Berger found that rather than simply secularize, societies pluralize: Religious traditions multiply in modern societies but they do not necessarily diminish. What increases is the individual responsibility to choose one of those traditions, or none. The expectations of utopian secularists and militant atheists for a Comtean world are exaggerated. It was a prescient point considering the half-century that followed The Sacred Canopy’s publication.

Thomas Jefferson, Conservative

by Clyde Wilson

A Review of The Sage of Monticello, by Dumas Malone, Volume Six of Jefferson and His Time, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975, 551 pages.

In 1809 Thomas Jefferson yielded up the Presidency and crossed into Virginia. In the 17 active years remaining to him he never left it. The first volume of Malone's masterpiece, published in 1948, was Jefferson the Virginian. The sixth and last is The Sage of Monticello. Jefferson begins and ends with Virginia. Keep this fact in mind. It will save us from many errors and lead us as near to the truth as we can get in regard to this sometimes enigmatic Founding Father.

No great American, not even Lincoln, has been put to so many contradictory uses by later generations of enemies and apologists, and therefore none has undergone so much distortion. In fact, most of what has been asserted about Jefferson in the last hundred years—and even more of what has been implied or assumed about him—is so lacking in context and proportion as to be essentially false. What we commonly see is not Jefferson. It is a strange amalgam or composite in which the misconceptions of each succeeding generation have been combined and recombined until the original is no longer discernible.

Set Your iPad Aside, Open Your Books, and Let's Converse

by Robert Woods

I distinctly remember reading Jacques Ellul's books on technology, and specifically even remember where I was sitting when I read his The Technological Bluff, where he essentially argues that it is all but over and people will give over to the tidal wave of technology/technique.  Here we are more than twenty years later, and if Ellul was right about anything, he seems to have nailed this one.  

Like many, I do have a "smart-phone," an iPad (university issued), a laptop, and a desktop.  I do use email and a range of apps.  Despite that, I still consider myself a neo-Luddite at heart.  How so?  For me, I still see these as tools--tools to be used carefully recognizing the intended and unintended consequences.  One should recognize the gains and losses with the use of any tool.  It does seem the mad rush of the past decade to get an iPad (and other such tools) in the hands of all students to "make us smarter" follows on the heels of the illusion that if we could "simply get a computer in every classroom, in front of all students, they will all be smarter."  This craze started about twenty years ago.  Are we smarter?

Toward a Conservative Conservation Movement

by Tobias J. Lanz

Why Conservation Is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground, by Eric T. Freyfogle. Yale University Press

Environmental conservation has moved from the margin to the political mainstream in recent decades. However, despite the high profile and widespread public support of environmental issues, conservation policy has failed to achieve many of its goals. Eric Freyfogle, environmental law and policy professor at the University of Illinois, argues that this is because it has been caught between two extremes—people who love wild animals and wild places and those who want to protect their own individual rights and liberties. This tension has created a fragmented environmental movement and a confused and frustrated public.

This impasse must be overcome if conservation is to be truly effective. In short, conservation requires a communal approach, one Freyfogle terms a “land community” approach that sees environmental problems as more than legal, economic or technical issues, but as cultural ones. History must also be used as a framework to understand how environmental problems evolved and and to comprehend their broader social and ecological impact.