Why Did We Destroy Europe?” It’s an arresting title, chosen by Michael Polanyi for a 1970 essay that looks back on the conflagrations that consumed Europe between 1914 and 1945. (The essay can be found in Society, Economics & Philosophy, a posthumous volume of selected papers by Polanyi.) The short answer: “a fierce moral skepticism fired by moral indignation.”
The skepticism arises from the critical thrust of modern thought. Already in the seventeenth century, philosophers were judging inherited modes of thought and patterns of life to be irrational. Descartes compared the traditional knowledge of his time to a medieval town, with crooked lanes and houses built here and there without a coherent plan. Reform was impossible. Better to raze the town and start anew, this time in accord with reason.
Hostility to the status quo increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rousseau regarded existing society as a vicious conspiracy against our humanity. Jeremy Bentham formulated the philosophy of utilitarianism, which finds wanting all existing laws, traditions, and mores. Everything must be demolished and rebuilt in accord with a single moral maxim, the greatest good for the greatest number.
This is what Polanyi means by “fierce moral skepticism”: All that we inherit is guilty until proven innocent at the bar of unsullied nature, pure reason, and objective science. Polanyi notes a persistent characteristic of this approach. It accords moral prestige to outrage, protest, and revolution. Society is a cesspool of irrationality and injustice. No measure is beyond the pale, as long as it expunges the grave evils besetting society.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, moral indignation served an optimistic view of the future. Reformers pivoted from searing criticism of the status quo to hopeful accounts of the new society to be midwifed by reason and science. Once we were freed from ignorance and superstition, the better angels of our nature would take over. The past might be filled with cruelty and darkness, but the future would bring sweetness and light.
Polanyi was a professor of chemistry, a discipline that made him fully aware of the way in which science can shape our metaphysical imaginations. Scientific explanations are reductive. They rest on the assumption that the driving forces of the universe are impersonal and indifferent to human concerns about meaning and morality.
As a consequence, the rationalistic optimism of nineteenth-century progressivism was foredoomed. Reformers insisted that once the necessary demolition of our social system was complete, science would serve as the instrument of social reconstruction. But science offers no moral wisdom. Science analyzes; it does not guide and inspire. The French positivist Auguste Comte recognized as much, which is why he invented a new religion, the Religion of Humanity, to take the place of Christianity in his utopian scheme. Reason destroys, but it does not govern; rather, a new mystification arises. In the twentieth century, it was given a less than noble name: “propaganda.”
Polanyi calls this dynamic “moral inversion.” Modernity’s zeal for scientific critique destroys the moral traditions of the West. These critical techniques readily unmask these putatively baseless traditions, but that’s all. What they cannot do is create new foundations. Into the resulting vacuum rushes a moralistic pseudoscience.
Karl Marx offers a particularly clear example. His reductive scientism is complete. While writing a biography of him, Isaiah Berlin researched Marx’s manuscripts. Berlin observed (as Polanyi cites him) that the communist philosopher marked up the socialist manifestos of his time, vigorously crossing out appeals to rights and statements of the principles of justice. In the margins he penned fierce comments denouncing these moral terms as bourgeois ideology.
Hostility to moral language arose from Marx’s scientific reductionism. As he stipulates in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Economic conditions determine what we believe, including our beliefs about right and wrong. As history marches forward, moral truth changes accordingly.
In itself, the reduction of morality to economic conditions leads to the conclusion that there exist no transcendent truths by which to judge this or any other society. Marx solves the problem of relativism by boasting that he has discovered an objective science of history. This science purports to demonstrate the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and the inauguration of the end of history, which fulfills our humanity. In this way, Marxism does not condemn capitalism on moral grounds; it claims to serve the “objective” necessity of capitalism’s overthrow in order to usher in the “objective” truth of communism. As Polanyi observes, “Such an ideology simultaneously satisfies both the demands for scientific objectivity and the ideals of social justice, by interpreting man and history in terms of power and profit, while injecting into this materialistic reality the messianic passion for a free and righteous society.” The “science” of critique demolishes all current moral principles and political ideals. New imperatives take their place. But they are not moral; rather, they are “scientific.” They express the “laws of history,” which are as ruthlessly fixed as the law of gravity.
The upshot is moral nihilism. Armed with skepticism about the justice of present arrangements, “progressive” men give no quarter to the status quo. It must be destroyed without qualm. Those who hold power in the bourgeois order are merely masking their privilege with “ideals.” The agents of change, therefore, must be clear-minded. They should wield power so as to destroy power. Polanyi notes that such an attitude provides “moral justification for violence as the only honest mode of political action.” Lenin never disguised this logic. He once said, “Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society.” Assassination, mass murder, torture—these are means justified by the demands of “historical necessity.”
Polanyi notes that Nazism differed from communism in its determination of the driving force of history. Rather than resting on economic relations, Nazism sprang from a neoromantic blood-and-soil philosophy. But the upshot is similar. Like communists, Nazis derided liberal principles as weak and dishonest, and they relished violence as the honest refusal of the moral precepts that limit human action. Immorality becomes a higher morality. (Nietzsche often speaks this way.) Transgression gave birth to “the new,” the hoped-for future that realized the inner greatness of the individual (Nietzsche and countless bohemian artists and wannabe individualists), or of humanity (communism), or of the German people (Nazism).
The word “nihilism” is open-ended. In its strict philosophical sense, it denotes the denial of real existence: The world is founded on chaos, meaninglessness, and the void. In its moral and political sense, “nihilism” refers to a mentality that does not simply reject all norms and values as false and baseless, but aims to destroy their role and influence in society. In contrast to ancient skepticism and Epicureanism, which counseled calm acceptance, moral and political nihilism motivates an angry disposition, one bent on annihilation. Here is how the early twentieth-century French surrealist André Breton described his movement (which echoes the Russian radicalism of the previous century): “We were possessed by a will to total subversion.”
In Polanyi’s account, we destroyed Europe because we were bewitched by a perverted science. Its critical power stoked our outrage, drawing us toward moral and political nihilism. We seduced ourselves with imaginings of a saving science (communism) or a pure deed (Nazism and other movements). Hope was transmuted into belief in a redemptive “necessity” that was immune from critical examination: History, the People, Blood, the Will. But there can be no saving science. Nor are there pure deeds. Sinful men can be restrained only by moral discipline. Society can be governed humanely only by means of considered moral judgments. Having annihilated the past, which is the wellspring of wisdom, the West not only lost its defenses against the barbarians within. Much worse, it created some of the most destructive barbarians, “armed bohemians,” as Polanyi calls them. Armed with moral indignation and infused with an urgency that would not countenance moral constraints, they brought cataclysm and disaster.
The fact that we’re doing so again troubles my sleep.
Postmortems After Auschwitz
I’d like to write a book about the soul-searching that was undertaken after World War II. During the early postwar years, Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Many other books fall into the genre. In Return of the Strong Gods, I discuss Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). I also treat The Authoritarian Personality (1950), an extremely influential book that conveyed the results of an extended study by a group of social scientists and Theodor Adorno. Their approach and conclusions echoed the analysis pioneered by Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933) and Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom, 1941).
In truth, the list of postmortems of disaster is nearly endless. From the 1930s through the first decades of the postwar era, many sought to understand the civilizational catastrophe that engulfed the West. Christopher Dawson (The Making of Europe, 1932) and T. S. Eliot (The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939) viewed the recession of Christianity with foreboding. They recognized that culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum. A millennium ago, the love society of the Church had tamed the warrior society. The victory was not permanent. Unless the leaven of the gospel is renewed in every generation, hard men willing to do hard things will be ascendant.
Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) should be read as a meditation on Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Weaver blames William of Ockham and the nominalist view of truth. In the Catholic tradition, too, this account was often advanced as a general explanation of modern perversions and evils. A young Jacques Maritain wrote a book in this genre, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (1928). Étienne Gilson advanced the anti-nominalist thesis in a more erudite fashion in a book that influenced Weaver, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (1936).
The question of what went wrong was so pressing that answers crop up in surprising places. As a graduate student in the late 1980s, I was taken aback when I read Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach’s account of the rise of narrative realism. In the book’s final pages, Auerbach reveals that he intends his richly detailed analysis as a preparation for understanding the rise of Nazism. The brutalities of modern ideology reflect the tyranny of the “single formula,” which runs roughshod over the unique particularity of the human person. Moreover, the literary culture of the twentieth century was captive to the “impression of hopelessness” and prone to delight in portraying the human condition “under its most brutal aspects.” As a result, literature had not played its role as defender of reality in all its vulnerable texture. Auerbach’s claims about the literary causes of Auschwitz seem a stretch, the sort of thing only an academic can believe. Yet when I put down the book, I found myself unable to reject his assessment. I came to see that Auerbach was advancing a literary version of the more theologically explicit diagnoses provided by Dawson and Eliot.
More theological still was the work of Reinhold Niebuhr. His star rose in the 1950s because he helped readers understand the importance of the doctrines of original sin and divine providence. We cannot author a utopian “new beginning.” The undertow of self-love is too great. We can only do what little good is within our power, trusting in God to ensure the triumph of justice on his timetable, not ours. Niebuhr also saw that an optimistic, liberal mindset had disarmed us in the face of grave evils. Auschwitz was authored by evil men, to be sure, but their path was made clear by naive men.
Michael Polanyi deserves his own chapter. I’ve described his analysis above. There’s more to say. He understood the allure of modern science. Its promise of truth, adamantine, pure, and objective, can bewitch us. Yet “science” is an abstraction. It knows nothing. It is a discipline, a method. Only human beings know. Truth remains a mere possibility unless we grasp it, affirm it, and remain loyal to it. In Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958), his most widely read book, Polanyi details our dependence on intuitions, sentiments, and prejudices. He calls these ways of knowing “tacit knowledge,” on which we depend to make reliable judgments concerning truth. Knowing is an art, in which we must be trained. The tragedy of modernity lies in our exaltation of science at the expense of other ways of knowing. We have failed to educate our souls (an education Plato recognized as essential for philosophy), and as a result we have made ourselves vulnerable to all manner of seductions.
By my reading, a great deal of what Leo Strauss wrote chimes with Polanyi. His wartime lecture “German Nihilism” identifies the peril of an intellectual culture that, however sophisticated, is unwilling to dwell patiently with perennial questions of truth and goodness. Deprived of an encounter with “the classical ideal of humanity,” the best and brightest students hearken to political prophets and modern witch doctors of the soul. Strauss’s distinctive pedagogy sought to remedy this metaphysical deficiency. It required close (noncritical in the modern sense) readings of premodern books. It’s controversial to say so, but after World War II Martin Heidegger’s gnomic writings expressed views that seem quite different but in fact were similar. Both men recoiled from the nihilism implicit in modern scientific culture. And both conjured metaphysical substance that they could not quite bring themselves to believe in, even as they insisted on its necessity.
I’ve mentioned Richard Weaver. In the American context, his voice was eccentric. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was more typical. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949) was not written as a postmortem for Europe. Schlesinger sought to shape the postwar liberal consensus in the United States. But the social analysis he used to frame the challenges facing the country was widely believed to be the best way to understand the turmoil of the first decades of the twentieth century. Schlesinger saw a central tension in modern life. (The great sociologist Émile Durkheim had identified this tension a generation earlier.) We cherish the new freedoms of an open, liberal society and we enjoy the fruits of a dynamic capitalist economy, but we also seek continuity and belonging. Responsible leadership involves sustaining a balance between freedom and solidarity—the vital center.
The notion that we must balance change and continuity, individualism and belonging, played an important role in my education. By and large, this analysis was the canonical explanation of Nazism for most postwar Americans. (In my youth, communism was largely excused by establishment liberals.) Europe had been shipwrecked because it lost the proper balance. Demoralized by defeat, disoriented by democracy, buffeted by inflation, the German people felt unmoored, and they overcorrected toward an authoritarian and ethnocentric sense of belonging. Our job was to keep things in balance.
In his own postwar book, The Quest for Community (1953), Robert Nisbet warned that what seemed like a snug middle-class culture in America was in fact a dangerously atomized and lonely place. Others emphasized the inhumanity of modern industrial society. James Burnham foresaw the triumph of a cold-blooded technocratic elite in The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham’s account informed George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which is perhaps the most widely read and influential diagnosis of the self-immolation of the West during the first half of the twentieth century.
Polanyi spoke of the destruction of Europe, but America was implicated as well. Not only is our country part of the same civilization that endured between 1914 and 1945 a cataclysm that was as devastating as the wars of religion. It also participated, firebombing cities and dropping atomic bombs. The trauma was so great that after 1945 every aspect of our culture was reshaped in order to guard against the return of Hitler. (I argue this thesis in Return of the Strong Gods.) The postmortems not only explained what had occurred; their analyses and warnings shaped the world in which we now live, a world that seems to be careening toward a very different kind of catastrophe, one trait of which is a dangerously misguided preoccupation with fighting fascism.
Finding Truth Amid Lies
Dr. Clare Craig experienced two awakenings during the Covid years. The first was intellectual. She was a diagnostic pathologist working for the National Health Service in the UK As did so many medical professionals in 2020, she turned her attention to the pandemic. She realized that judicious consideration of the evidence—the foundation of scientific judgment—played little role in justifying the imposition of draconian policies. She was forced to conclude that the medical establishment is corrupt. The second awakening was spiritual. She came to realize that Christianity provides trustworthy truths that even sinful men cannot corrupt.
Craig tells her story in a video produced by HART, a group of academic experts from various disciplines who are skeptical about the institutional behemoth called “the science.” She notes that in 2020 she was naive. She imagined that informed interventions in the debate about Covid policies would be welcomed. But when she pointed out the high health and social costs of lockdowns, and the detrimental effects of school closures, she was attacked and her career threatened.
The vaccine tipped her over the edge. Its release was accompanied by outright lies about its effectiveness. Widespread adoption had no noticeable effect on the spread of the virus, however beneficial it might have been for those most vulnerable. Concerns about the vaccine’s unproven safety were dismissed. Extreme measures of social coercion were employed to force people to get the jab. Most troubling was the requirement that young children receive an experimental vaccination that provided them with no benefit, given the fact that Covid poses little threat to the young.
Why were the facts ignored? Why were informed critics silenced? (They still are.) In Craig’s telling, these questions forced her to recognize that “science” is not an activity conducted by angels. Human beings “do science,” and they are as susceptible to fear, panic, cupidity, and peer pressure as anyone else. Careerism, desire for money, and lust for prestige affect scientists to the same degree as investment bankers—perhaps more so, given the way in which noble vocations can so easily be used to veil one’s base ambitions, not only from others, but more importantly from oneself.
Moreover, “the science” is an increasingly bureaucratic phenomenon. The era of the lone scientist in his lab is long past. Vast sums of government money are now necessary to sustain science as currently practiced. “Top” scientists are more likely to be effective managers and adroit academic politicians than original and independent minds. As a result, those in positions of power and prestige are the least likely to take controversial stands and risk career setbacks. Of course they went along with the lockdown catastrophe. Of course they agreed to censor dissent. Craig is embarrassed to have been taken by surprise. What ever made her so naive as to imagine that truth would win out over human sinfulness?
That question got her thinking about Christianity. She read Acts 4–5, where Peter and his colleagues preach Christ crucified and risen. The authorities in Jerusalem find their forthright speaking inconvenient. Yes, perhaps there were healings and other powerful signs that ought to be taken into consideration. But the authorities have no time for truth. Peter, John, and the others must be stopped! But the apostles are not intimidated. Even imprisonment fails to cow them. They refuse to be silent.
Craig wondered over this episode in the New Testament. What motivates us to defend ethical principles and evident truths at personal cost? Don’t we need a trustworthy place to stand in order to resist the principalities and powers that rule our fallen world? Further questions pressed upon her. Was the stunning failure of scientists and medical professionals during Covid a consequence of secularism, which creates a world denuded of higher loyalties that empower us to bear witness to the truth? Has the recession of Christianity led us into a culture ruled by a dark and perverted science, as C. S. Lewis warned?
As she conveys the lessons of Covid, Craig concludes with an arresting observation. A growing minority of intelligent and reflective people are awakening to the betrayals of secular society, of which “the science” is a central pillar. Those asking questions may not agree with the details of Craig’s analysis of lockdowns or vaccines. But they sense that the pandemic was not merely mishandled. Deliberate lies were told. Extreme measures of social control were employed by people who relished the opportunity to do so. Vast sums were spent to no good purpose. “The science” (along with the technocratic regime it underpins) was a god that failed. There’s a new openness to the God who will not fail us.
WHILE WE'RE AT IT
♦ An American Enterprise Institute study of loneliness (“AEI Survey on Community and Society: Social Capital, Civic Health, and Quality of Life in the United States”) indicates that loneliness and political activism are strongly correlated. Here is a summary of results penned by Ryan Streeter and David Wilde:
Political volunteers [for campaigns], for example, are less embedded in the social and communal environments that produce trust and social capital. They are more than twice as likely as ordinary Americans, and three times more likely than religious Americans, to say “rarely” or “never” when asked if there are people they feel close to. They are five times more likely than religious joiners to say they rarely or never have someone they can turn to in times of need. And they are also more likely than other joiners to say their relationships are superficial.
Streeter and Wilde speculate that lonely people are attracted to the ersatz fellowship of feverish political agreement. “Lacking regular community, political joiners compensate ideologically. Eighty-seven percent report that their ideology gives them a sense of community, compared to 63 percent of ordinary Americans.”
♦ Writing for the European Conservative (“Why Do Bishops Cover Up Sexual Abuse?”), Joseph Shaw makes a perceptive remark about the institutional culture that gives rise to cover-ups:
In any institution the loyalty and obedience of subordinates is maintained by some kind of reward given by superiors. In commercial enterprises this is money, but money can be supplemented or replaced by many other things, including opportunities for abuse or protection against complaints. If BBC executives or Catholic bishops want to shore up their position within their organisation, protecting abusers will ensure that at least an important section of their subordinates are loyal and uncomplaining. Once a culture of abuse is established, more and more people who can be motivated in this way will be drawn into the institution, while the people not wanting to play along will be marginalised, rendered powerless, and leave.
♦ I noticed a clever ad for the YouVersion Bible App on a New York subway. “Zero stars,” the copy reads, with an image featuring five unchecked stars, followed by a comment: “Would not recommend. —Satan.” Senior editor Dan Hitchens saw the same ad in the London Tube, which he thought less clever than groan-inducing, as dad jokes so often are.
♦ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg on a writer’s fears: “I regard reviews as a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or less degree. There are instances of the soundest dying of them, while the feeble often come through. Many don’t catch them at all. Attempts have often been made to ward them off with the aid of amulets of prefaces and dedications, or even to inoculate them with self-criticisms, but this doesn’t always work.”
♦ Jacobin purports to revive Marxism in American politics. I don’t think it succeeds. One or another species of socialism serves as the house philosophy for most elite cultural institutions. It’s hard to be anti-system when you are a central pillar of the system. (As evidence, in 2017 the foundation that publishes Jacobin received a generous grant from the über-establishment Annenberg Foundation.) Nevertheless, I enjoy paging through the quarterly issues. The artwork is superb. And I was pleased to see that the Spring 2024 number was dedicated to a theme close to my heart: religion in public life. Some content is entirely predictable: “Capitalism is itself a kind of spiritual illness.” Other material is charming in its old-fashioned conceits, such as a reference to Marxism’s “scientific understanding of history.” 1960s priests and nuns offer reassuring subject matter. Yes, Virginia, there are Christian socialists. Reza Aslan instructs readers that the notion that Jesus is God incarnate is an anachronism. After Constantine’s conversion, the doctrine was part of the Roman imperial effort to “depoliticize” Jesus, who was a political revolutionary, not a religious man. (No, wait, according to Aslan a political revolutionary is the sine qua non of true faith.) The issue includes an extensive and useful survey of religion’s influence in nations throughout the world. I cheered when a look back at the New Atheists ended with the observation that they “were bombastic and self-righteous” and “made poor instructors in the art of critical thinking.”
♦ Also writing about religion for Jacobin, Dustin Guastella observes that latter-day leftism may advance socialist goals in economic policy, but it tends to default to “a morally neutral egalitarianism.” According to this doctrine, everyone should have an equal opportunity to define his own values. As Guastella notes, this outlook amounts to an endorsement of liberalism’s moral minimalism: “the live-and-let-live attitude that says it’s none of my business how any particular person lives their [sic] life, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my ability to do the same.” It’s the morality suited to capitalism, Guastella argues. If socialists are to offer an alternative vision of social life, it needs to be a moral alternative:
In the coming period, socialists will again and again be forced to confront moral questions as social questions. The push for the legalization of more drugs will expand—the State of Oregon at first said yes, and then said no. Sports betting and other forms of digital gambling continue their spread. Next up is whether capitalist societies will liberalize assisted suicide—an option that will surely be taken up by the poor, the disabled, the lonely, the economically “redundant.” What do socialists say? Is it a good society that allows the consequences of its madness to be killed off “consensually”? Does it make one a good person to advocate for it?
Until and unless the left can develop a consistent moral theory of its own, Christianity will continue to have something useful to say about the biggest social questions that confront modern society. Maybe it’s worth listening.
Indeed, it is worth listening.
♦ I was chatting with an Israeli friend. We talked about the role of Judaism in Israeli society. He observed that in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, there was an upsurge in demand for tzitzit, especially among IDF soldiers. (Tzitzit are specially knotted tassels on the four corners of an undergarment worn by orthodox Jews.) The phenomenon does not necessarily suggest a religious revival. It indicates the adoption of a religious symbol as the sign of national unity. As we talked, I marveled at the reversal of fortunes. In my childhood, American society was nominally religious. Today Israeli society is nominally secular. May the trend spread.
♦ Michael Polanyi writing in 1957: “Today, if you are resolved to flout the obvious requirements of common sense and decide to plunge the world into obscurantism, you naturally invoke the justification of science.” Prescient, especially when one thinks of late March 2020.
♦ The Rainbow Reich gauleiters have not been shy about exploiting the recent uproar over IVF. In a panic, the Alabama legislature passed a law giving the IVF industry in that state almost complete immunity from tort liability. In Michigan, the governor and legislature arranged for a bill that ensures enforcement of commercial surrogacy contracts. We are well on our way to the progressive goal of babies on demand. Like abortion on demand, it advances under the flag of “reproductive freedom.”
♦ UK Member of Parliament Miriam Cates had this to say after an official report (known as the Cass Review) raised concerns about the rush to “gender-affirming” treatment for kids: “This scandal happened because too many adults put their own desire for social approval above the safety of vulnerable children.”
♦ The Cass Review brings the UK in line with Denmark and other European countries where the medical establishments have expressed reservations about transgender ideology and its undue influence over medical decisions about children. The United States remains an outlier. We are the cutting edge of the sexual revolution, and we’re determined to remain so.
♦ UnHerd’s editor in chief Freddie Sayers dug into the origins and activities of the Global Disinformation Index. The UK organization was founded in 2018 to stifle the “wrong” sorts of messages. It rates websites, and its ratings affect online ad placements. The goal is to starve the “bad” websites of income. The index rates left-wing ProPublica as “least dangerous,” while the American Conservative and The Federalist are among those ranked “most dangerous.” Not surprisingly, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations provided funding to get this operation going. Of greater note is the fact that money also came from the UK government, the European Union, the German Foreign Office, and an entity created and funded by the State Department. There you have it: We pay taxes so that we can be censored and silenced.
♦ NPR veteran Uri Berliner made a stir when he wrote an exposé of the government-funded radio network’s relentless left-wing bias. He gives examples: plugging the Russian collusion hoax, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, insisting that it’s false to say that the Covid virus was produced in a Wuhan lab. In the BLM hysteria of 2020, NPR management required reporters to record the race, gender, and ethnicity of every person interviewed for their stories. Berliner’s survey of NPR’s national newsroom staff revealed eighty-seven registered Democrats, zero Republicans. That’s the bad news. The good news: NPR’s radio audience is dwindling, and its podcast downloads have declined. As Berliner notes, “The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact.” No surprise. At this juncture, the sole purpose of NPR is to validate the beliefs of rich white liberals in college towns.
♦ Dan Hitchens told me that my reflections about Polanyi reminded him of Ratzinger in The Feast of Faith:
The Marxist approach . . . is not affirmation but outrage, opposition to being because it is bad and so must be changed. Prayer is an act of being; it is affirmation, albeit not affirmation of myself as I am and of the world as it is, but affirmation of the ground of being and hence a purifying of myself and of the world from this ground upward. All purification (every via negation) is only possible on the rocklike basis of affirmation, of consent: Jesus Christ is Yes. (cf. 2 Cor. 1:19f.)
♦ A female friend expressed outrage that Caitlin Clark would be paid a piddling $76,000 in her first year in the WNBA. (By comparison, the first pick in the 2023 NBA draft signed a four-year contract for $55 million.) I asked her what team drafted Clark. She did not know. I asked her whether she knew the name of New York’s WNBA team. She did not. The name of any team in the WNBA? Nope. A famous player in the WNBA? Again, no answer.
♦ The UKis presently being convulsed by efforts to suppress nicotine, not just in the form of cigarettes, but also in other methods of delivery, such as vaping. We’re experiencing a similar although less advanced campaign against nicotine in the United States, in parallel with the drive toward decriminalizing marijuana. Along with potatoes, tobacco came to Europe soon after Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. One would think that the anti-colonialist lobby would defend nicotine as a shining non-Western contribution to Western civilization.
♦ The National Conservatism movement (with which I am associated) scheduled a conference in Brussels in mid-April. Featured speakers included Viktor Orbán and Nigel Farage, who are invariably described by the mainstream press as “far right.” Not one, but two venues were pressured to cancel the conference. After a third was secured, the left-wing regional mayor sent the police to shut it down, citing public safety. A Belgian court struck down the order that evening, and the conference was able to go on as planned. Ryszard Legutko was one of the speakers. (He’s a First Things writer, I’m proud to say.) He had this to say in Compact magazine:
The incident encapsulates much of what is wrong in the West today. To put it simply, no principle generally proclaimed to be sacred is really sacred. Freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, the sanctity of privacy—the rules to which the European elites unceasingly pay lip service—don’t count. When it comes to fighting conservatives, the principles can be easily suspended or ignored. The European Parliament didn’t react to the incident, although several of its members [Legutko among them] were among those whose freedoms had been violated. Belgium’s prime minister satisfied himself with a statement of mild indignation but did nothing practical to change the situation. I heard of no protests from mainstream institutions and organizations. Needless to say, such protests would have undoubtedly exploded throughout Europe if the victims were liberals, socialists, environmentalists, LGBT activists, or other left-wing groups.
Legutko concludes with an observation about the failure of the purportedly liberal establishment to take a firm stand: “Cowards will always find an excuse for failing to act decently and hide their fear behind clumsy arguments. In a society that has increasingly busied itself with tracking down enemies, fear is on the rise, and so is cowardly behavior.” The observation applies to many leaders of elite universities in the United States.
♦ Anti-fascist hysteria licenses political violence. We saw it happen in Portland, Oregon, where in 2020 left-wing radicals regularly clashed with police in front of a federal courthouse. The danger is greater still in Germany. Alternative für Deutschland politicians are regularly targeted with death threats. Some have been assaulted and hospitalized. The line often attributed to the Louisiana populist Huey Long comes to mind: “When fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-fascism.”
♦ Readers of this magazine are an impressive bunch. It takes some intellectual horsepower to motor through an issue. As one reader put it, “Subscribing to First Things is like doing a graduate degree in philosophy and theology.” It’s natural to want to share this exciting enterprise, which is why ROFTers groups spring up in so many places. This month we have three readers who want to form new ROFTers groups:
Jeff LeMaster of Orlando, Florida. Contact him at jefflemaster[at]gmail.com.
John Trecker of Kansas City, Kansas. He can be reached at jttrecker[at]gmail.com.
Spencer Revely of Honolulu, Hawaii. His contact: sdrevely[at]gmail.com.
♦ The ROFTers group of Northern Colorado (Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland) is looking for new members. If you’d like to meet every two weeks with First Things devotees, get in touch with Paul Wilson: paulwilson4872[at]gmail.com.
♦ Final numbers are in for our fundraising effort to support the redesign of firstthings.com. Our goal was to raise 60 percent of the $114,000 estimated cost of a new website. We exceeded that goal as 270 donors contributed a total of $74,011. Thank you for your support.
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
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