Last April, I stopped briefly in Philadelphia to deliver a short paper at the Philadelphia Society’s 43rd National Meeting. The general topic was “Challenges to Conservatism.” (I, too, have a hard time believing they managed to get to the bottom of that list in a day and a half.) My panel was devoted to the theme of “Globalization,” which, depending on how you look at things, I suppose might be regarded as a challenge of or a challenge to conservatism. In any event, I was asked to say a few words about “multiculturalism,” that university-nurtured version of cultural relativism that has now firmly ensconced itself wherever politically correct college-educated elites congregate, which is to say just about everywhere.

I won’t rehearse my brief against multiculturalism here. But I would like to observe that it seems to me that perhaps the most pressing “challenge to conservatism” today is the failure of liberalism. That may sound paradoxical. It isn’t. Russell Kirk once said that he was conservative because he was a liberal. Of course, the liberalism Kirk had in mind was not the rancid leftism that today congregates under and betrays the name of liberalism but rather the robust classical liberalism espoused, for example, by Edmund Burke–liberalism, so to say, abundantly endowed with red corpuscles.

In this sense, multiculturalism is not so much an expression of liberalism as a symptom of a characteristic disease or antinomy of liberalism. The antinomy is this: liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. Extending tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. But intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism, namely, openness. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

As I have argued earlier in this space, the escape from that antinomy lies in understanding that “tolerance” and “openness” must be limited by positive values if they are not to be vacuous. American democracy, for example, affords its citizens great latitude, but great latitude is not synonymous with the proposition that “anything goes.” Far from it. Our society, like every society, is founded on particular positive values–the rule of law, for example, as well as respect for the individual, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state.

I thought about all this when casting my over a column by Ian Buruma called “The Strange Death of Multiculturalism”. Anyone familiar with Buruma’s work will not be surprised to learn that he is a darling of such organs as The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. And it is simply delicious that Mr. Buruma, in addition to his many other plaudits, should be “professor of human rights, democracy, and new-media studies” at–it seems too good to be true, but it is true–Bard College. Would that Randall Jarrell were with us today to write a sequel to Pictures from an Institution. A professor of “human rights, democracy, and new-media studies” at Bard College would be something irresistible.

Mr. Buruma’s great attraction is his unmovable tenancy in the middle of the road. He is the living instantiation of Hazlitt’s “commonplace critic,” who searches for truth “in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.” On the subject of multiculturalism, for example, Mr. Buruma says of course we don’t want mad Mullahs padding about blowing up buildings, beheading journalists, etc. But at the same time, “If we antagonize Europe’s Muslims” too much, they might become even worse. Much better to–well, I was going to say “live and learn,” but that isn’t quite right: much better to frown a little but learn or relearn the virtue of tolerance to love the little bit of Muslim that’s buried in us all. This, I suppose, is one reason he has been so contemptuous of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born writer and former Dutch politician who has been subject to death threats for criticizing Islam. We must, Mr. Buruma suggests, “weigh our words with care. We should distinguish carefully between different kinds of Islam, and not confuse violent revolutionary movements with mere religious orthodoxy.” Really, he thinks, a large part of the problem is us: us Westerners trying to foist of what are after all only our values on other people:

The trouble today is that Enlightenment values are sometimes used in a very dogmatic way against Muslims. They have become in fact a form of nationalism - “our values” have been set against “their values.” The reason for defending Enlightenment values is that they are based on good ideas, and not because they are “our culture.”

There may be plenty of things to criticize about Enlightenment thinking. As the philosopher David Stove once observed, “Enlightened opinions are always superficial.” But let’s leave that to one side here and ponder the dichotomy Mr. Buruma presents: “our values” vs. “their values.” Let’s see, on our side we have:

- political, economic, and religious liberty
- full citizenship for women
- separation of church and state
- freedom of inquiry
- embrace of the free market as an engine of wealth
Etc.

On their side we have:

- absolute submission to the will of Allah
- religious intolerance
- servitude of women
- barbaric ritual punishments for crime
- recourse to suicide bombers as an instruments of policy
Etc.

Pace Mr. Buruma, I think that part of what makes “our culture” ours are the customs, values, and practices that have defined it. Some of those values are “Enlightenment values,” some long predate and even conflict with Enlightenment values. But we subscribe to it not because of any abstract inventory of merit but, on the contrary, because it is ours.

Every so often, Mr. Buruma flickers into focus as hard-headed realist: after all, this is the way things are, and if we want to succeed, we just have to suck it up and go along:

Whether Europeans like it or not, Muslims are part of Europe. Many will not abandon their religion, so Europeans must learn to live with them and with Islam. Of course, this will be easier if Muslims come to believe that the system also works to their benefit. Liberal democracy and Islam are reconcilable. Indonesia’s current political transition from dictatorship to democracy, although no unqualified success, shows that this is achievable.

Even if all of Europe’s Muslims were Islamists - which is a far cry from reality - they could not threaten the Continent’s sovereignty and, by the same token, its laws and Enlightenment values. Of course, there are groups to which Islamism appeals. The children of immigrants, born in Europe, sense they are not fully accepted in the country where they grew up, but neither do they feel a special bond with their parent’s native country. Islamism, besides offering them an answer to the question why they do not feel happy with the way they live, gives them a sense of their self-worth and a great cause to die for.

In the end, the only thing that can truly damage European values is Europe’s response to its non-Muslim majority. Fear of Islam and of immigrants could lead to the adoption of non-liberal laws. By defending Enlightenment values in a dogmatic way Europeans will be the ones who undermine them.

Where to begin? Many Muslims will not abandon their religion, so . . . So we have to capitulate? So we should look forward to a Muslim Europe? Are Islam and liberal democracy “reconcilable”? Are you convinced by the example of Indonesia? What then of Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Somolia, etc., etc.? “Even if all of Europe’s Muslims were Islamists . . . they could not threaten the Continent’s sovereignty and, by the same token, its laws and Enlightenment values.” Hello? Earth to Ian: come in please! And as for the idea that “the only thing that can truly damage European values is Europe’s response to its non-Muslim majority,” tell that to Theo van Gogh, tell it to the victims of London’s subway bombing, tell it to the victims of the train bombing in Madrid.

Mr. Buruma ends by pleading that “We must do everything to encourage Europe’s Muslim to become assimilated in European societies.” (”It is,” he says, “our only hope.”) I agree. But what Mr. Buruma argues for is not the assimilation of Muslims into European culture but the melding of European and Muslim culture, a far different proposition.

Mr. Buruma dusts off and updates the old “better Red than dead” philosophy that animated many left-winger in the Cold War. Sure, we in the West “must defend our freedoms against the holy warriors who seek to destroy them,” he says in another column. “But we must also be careful that in doing so we don’t end up undermining them ourselves. In the balance between security and civil liberty, the latter should never be sacrificed to the former.” The chorus asks: What never? Tell that to Abraham Lincoln, FDR, or Winston Churchill. Civil liberties are precious; but it is sanctimonious flapdoodle to pretend that they “should never be sacrificed” to security.

The case of Mr. Buruma illustrates an important point: That the “openness” that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view: it is not “value neutral.” It need not, indeed it cannot, say Yes to all comers, to the Islamofascist who after all has his point of view, just as much as the soccer mom, who has hers. Western democratic society is rooted in a particular vision of what Aristotle called “the good for man.” The question is: Do we, as a society, still have confidence in the animating values of the vision? Do we possess the requisite will to defend them? Or was Jean François Revel right when he said that “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it”? The jury is still out on those questions. How they are answered will determine the future not only of Western universities but also of that astonishing spiritual-political experiment that is Western democratic liberalism.

There he goes again! That Barry–I mean, Barrack Obama. He’s not a liberal–yes, the man with the Senate’s leftist voting record is “not a liberal” because all those old “labels” don’t apply anymore. He’s a “progressive” you see–but in case you smell too much gas, he hastily adds ” . . . and a pragmatist.”

Great: just what we need, a guy with his head in the clouds who can get things done. Why do people people think it is less offensive to be a “progressive” than a “liberal”? Maybe it’s because most people don’t quite know what a “progressive” is–they haven’t quite cottoned on to the fact that it means someone who believes your money really belongs to the state, who thinks the idea of the nation state is a little stale and needs tinkering if not outright repudiation, who believes in big–and I mean BIG–government, who can’t contemplate a bureaucratic without a feeling of pleasure, who distrusts the military, especially the U.S. military, who basically, which you come right down to it, doesn’t think people should be allowed to take care of themselves.

OF course, there is an important sense in which Obama really is not a liberal. It used to be that “liberal” described someone who believed in individual freedom. It described someone like Edmund Burke, who had a healthy suspicion of large-scale schemes to effect a revolution in human affairs. It described someone like Russell Kirk, who once declared that “He was conservative because he was liberal,” i.e., he fought to preserve and conserve traditional social, moral, and political institutions because they provided important bulwarks to defend freedom.

But that was yesterday. Today “liberal” equals “progressive” which equals higher taxes, further assaults on the economy, more government intrusion into your life.

I’ll take an old-style liberal any day.

The new(ish) French President, Nicolas Sarkozy said that his victory last year was the final nail in the coffin of les evenements of 1968. Not so fast, Nick! The fatuous Left is like Dracula: you need a lot more more than a coffin and nails to dispatch it. Listen: that slobbering whine you hear is the sound of the rancid Left rattling their love beads and shaking their canes and walkers as they fondly remember what they can barely recall from the Summer of Love. Here it is, 2008, forty years on: what Allan Bloom rightly called the annus horribilis of the 1968s is now covered in a soft glaze not only of cataracts but sentimentalizing nostalgia. The competition for the laurel of Most Emetic Essay in Praise of the 1960s is on! It is only the first quarter of the year, we still have many months to go before all the contestants are duly registered, but surely the preposterous eructation by Tariq Ali in Saturday’s Guardian is destined to achieve at least honorable mention, if not the red palm of ultimate fatuousness.

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.

If the Vietnamese were defeating the world’s most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers: that was the dominant mood among the more radical of the 60s generation.

In February 1968, the Vietnamese communists launched their famous Tet offensive, attacking US troops in every major South Vietnamese city. The grand finale was the sight of Vietnamese guerrillas occupying the US embassy in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and raising their flag from its roof.

And so on. It’s no good pointing out that the Vietnamese were not “defeating” the U.S., that Tet was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese, or indeed that the Vietnam conflict was not “brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country” but an effort to save a “poor south-east Asian country” (i.e., South Vietnam) from the horrors of Communist tyranny.

Don’t bother. You’d be wasting your breath. For Tariq Ali, the period between 1965 and 1975 was “the glorious decade, . . . of which the year 1968 was only the high point.” Politics was the “high point,” but there were also the “narratives” (Ali has been to school with the lit-crit crowd, you see) of “sexual liberation and a hedonistic entrepreneurship from below.” You have to admire the completeness of Ali’s fantasy. Just about every cliché dear to the Left is here. Joseph McCarthy? Check. The idea that the 1950s were a decade of conformity and repression? Check? Even the old left-wing war horse of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War makes a cameo appearance.

Packages of cigarettes come with a warning from the Surgeon General–did that begin in the 1960s too, I wonder?–surely essays like Tariq Ali’s should come with some sort of notice warning about nausea, elevated blood pressure, and the like.

As I say, though, Ali’s essay will be one of scores or even hundreds of hosannas to that decade of pampered self-indulgence, political mendacity, and cosmic irresponsibility. Several years ago, I wrote The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution Changed America , which attempts to provide a corrective. And just a couple of months ago, I offered some later reflections looking back on 1968 for the Swiss magazine Weltwoche . I thought it might be worth repeating some of what I said here. What, with the wisdom of hindsight, should we think of that convulsive moment? Tariq Ali’s is hardly the only nostalgic backward glance: Youth! Freedom! Sex! Were not the Sixties the Last Good Time, an era of hope, idealism, the promise of emancipation from—well, from everything? “Only a few periods in American history,” The New York Times intoned in an editorial,

have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition. . . . The 60’s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual’s responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption.

It seems so long ago, shrouded in a Day-Glo glaze of grateful recollection. But when it comes to the Sixties, Thomas Mann was right: “The past isn’t dead,” he wrote, “it isn’t event past.” Indeed, paroxysms of the 1960s, which trembled with gathering force through North America and Western Europe from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, continue to reverberate throughout our culture. The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.

Even now it is difficult to gauge the extent of that transformation. Looking back over his long and distinguished career in an essay called “A Life of Learning,” the philosopher Paul Oskar Kristeller sounded a melancholy note. “We have witnessed,” he wrote, “what amounts to a cultural revolution, comparable to the one in China if not worse, and whereas the Chinese have to some extent overcome their cultural revolution, I see many signs that ours is getting worse all the time, and no indication that it will be overcome in the foreseeable future.”

In democratic societies, where free elections are guaranteed, political revolution is almost unthinkable in practical terms. Consequently, utopian efforts to transform society have been channeled into cultural and moral life. In America and Western Europe, scattered if much-publicized episodes of violence have wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls. Consequently, the success of the cultural revolution of the 1960s can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation.

In his reflections on the life of learning, Kristeller was concerned primarily with the degradation of intellectual standards that this cultural revolution brought about. “One sign of our situation,” he noted, “is the low level of our public and even of our academic discussion. The frequent disregard for facts or evidence, or rational discourse and arguments, and even of consistency, is appalling.” Who can disagree?

As Kristeller suggests, however, the intellectual wreckage visited upon our educational institutions and traditions of scholarship is only part of the story. There are also social, political, and moral dimensions to the cultural revolution of the Sixities—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the spiritual deformations we have witnessed are global, and affect every aspect of life. Writing in The Totalitarian Temptation, Jean-François Revel noted that “a revolution is not simply a new political orientation. It works through the depths of society. It writes the play in which political leaders will act much later.”

Tariq Ali is right that the movement for sexual “liberation” (not to say outright debauchery) occupied a prominent place in the etiology of this revolution, as did the mainstreaming of the drug culture and its attendant pathologies. Indeed, the two are related. Both are expressions of the narcissistic hedonism that was an important ingredient of the counterculture from its development in the 1950s. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse was not joking when, in Eros and Civilization—one of many inspirational tracts for the movement—he extolled the salvational properties of “primary narcissism” as an effective protest against the “repressive order of procreative sexuality.” “The images of Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and Thanatos,” Marcuse wrote. “They recall the experience of a world that is not to be mastered and controlled but to be liberated: . . . the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise—the Nirvana principle not as death but as life.”

The succeeding decades showed beyond cavil that the pursuit of “the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time” was narcissistic in a far more common sense than Marcuse suggested. It turned out to be a form of death-in-life, not “paradise.”

One of the most conspicuous, and conspicuously jejune, features of the cultural revolution of the 1960s has been the union of such hedonism with a species of radical (or radical-chic) politics. This union fostered a situation in which, as the famous slogan put it, “the personal is the political.” The politics in question was seldom more than a congeries of radical clichés, serious only in that it helped to disrupt society and blight a good many lives. In that sense, to be sure, it proved to be very serious indeed.

Apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, the behavior of the “revolutionaries” of the counterculture consistently exhibited that most common of bourgeois passions, anti-bourgeois animus—expressed, as always, safely within the swaddling clothes of bourgeois security. As Allan Bloom, recalling Nietzsche, put it in The Closing of the American Mind, the cultural revolution proved to be so successful on college campuses partly because of “the bourgeois’ need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited. . . . Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man.” It almost goes without saying that, like all narcotics, the opiate of anti-bourgeois ire was both addictive and debilitating.

Like Falstaff’s dishonesty, the adolescent quality of these developments was “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” If America’s cultural revolution was anything, it was an attack on maturity: more, it was a glorification of youth, of immaturity. As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin put it, “We’re permanent adolescents.”

The real victory of the “youth culture” of the Sixties lay not in the fact that its demands were met but in the fact that its values and attitudes were adopted by the culture at large. Rubin again: “Satisfy our demands, and we’ve got twelve more. The more demands you satisfy, the more we got.” Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth—that is to say, of immaturity—over experience. It may seem like a small thing that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture speaks volumes. At the end of The Revolt of the Masses, his prescient 1930 essay on the direction of culture, José Ortega y Gasset noted that “Though it may appear incredible, ‘youth’ has become a chantage [blackmail]; we are in truth living in a time when this adopts two complementary attitudes, violence and caricature.”

The idealization of youth has resulted not only in the spread of adolescent values and passions: it has also led to the eclipse of adult virtues like circumspection, responsibility, and restraint. Writing about the cultural revolution in his book The Undoing of Thought, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut described this eclipse as “the triumph of babydom over thought.”

Today youth is the categorical imperative of all the generations. . . . People in their forties are teenagers who have not grown up. . . . It is no longer the case that adolescents take refuge in their collective identity, in order to get away from the world; rather it is an infatuated world which pursues adolescence. . . . The long process of the conversion to hedonism and consumerism of Western societies has culminated today in the worship of juvenile values. The bourgeois is dead, long live the adolescent.

The effect of these developments on cultural life in the West has been immense. One of the most far-reaching and destructive effects has been the simultaneous glorification and degradation of popular culture. Even as the most ephemeral and intellectually vacuous products of pop culture—rock videos, comic books, television sit-coms—are enlisted as fit subjects for the college curriculum, so, too, has the character of popular culture itself become ever more vulgar, vicious, and degrading.

A watershed moment came with the apotheosis of The Beatles in the mid-1960s. There is no denying that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were talented song writers, or that The Beatles (and their technicians) brought a new sophistication and inventiveness to rock music. It is also worth noting that in their proclamations of peace and love (blissed-out on drugs, but still) The Beatles stood in stark contrast to the more diabolical pronouncements of many other rock stars preaching a nihilistic gospel of (as the The Rolling Stones put it) “Let it Bleed” or “Sympathy for the Devil.” Nevertheless, The Beatles, like other rock musicians, were unmistakably prophets of Dionysian excess; and they were all the more effective on account of their occasional tunefulness and their cuddly image. The dangerous Dionysianism, however, was overlooked in the rush to acclaim them geniuses. Even today, some of the claims made for The Beatles are breathtaking. The literary critic Richard Poirier was hardly the only academic to make a fool of himself slobbering over the Fab Four. But his observation that “sometimes they are like Monteverdi and sometimes their songs are even better than Schumann’s” in Partisan Review in 1967 did establish a standard of fatuity that has rarely been surpassed.

Unfortunately, the more popular culture has been raised up—the more vigorously it has been championed by the cultural elite—the lower popular culture has sunk. At the same time, though—and this is one of the most insidious effects of the whole process—the integrity of high culture itself has been severely compromised by the mindless elevation of pop culture. The academic enfranchisement of popular culture has meant not only that trash has been mistaken for great art, but also that great art has been treated as if it were trash. When Allen Ginsberg (for example) is upheld in the classroom as a “great poet” comparable to Shakespeare, the very idea of greatness is rendered unintelligible and high art ceases to function as an ideal. To quote Alain Finkielkraut again:

It is not just that high culture must be demystified, brought remorselessly down to the level of the sort of everyday gestures which ordinary people perform in obscurity; sport, fashion, and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status. . . . [I]f you cannot accept that the author of the Essais [i.e., Montaigne] and a television personality, or a meditation designed to uplift the spirit and a spectacle calculated to brutalize, belong in the same cultural bracket; if you refuse, even though one is white and the other black, to equate Beethoven and Bob Marley—then you belong, quite irredeemably, to the party of the bastards (salauds) and the kill-joys.

In addition to its general coarsening effect on cultural life, this triumph of vulgarity has helped to pave the way for the success of the twin banes of political correctness and radical multiculturalism. The abandonment of intrinsic standards of achievement creates (in Hermann Broch’s phrase) a “value vacuum” in which everything is sucked through the sieve of politics and the ideology of victimhood. Thus it is that vanguard opinion champions the idea of “art” as a realm of morally unassailable privilege even as it undermines the realities that make artistic achievement possible: technique, a commitment to beauty, a grounding in tradition. Art retains its status as a source of spiritual uplift, however dubious, yet it also functions as an exercise of politics by other means.

Most of today’s college students were barely born when the Berlin Wall was dismantled; they had not yet been born when Saigon fell. To the present generation, the Sixties and all it represented seem like nostalgic snapshots from a bygone era. Yet despite the placidity of our own prosperous times, the radical, emancipationist assaults of the Sixties are not confined to the past. Robert Bork’s description of our situation as a “slouching towards Gomorrah” is melodramatic but not, I think, inaccurate. “The Sixties,” Judge Bork wrote,

may be seen in the universities as a mini-French Revolution that seemed to fail but did not. The radicals were not defeated by a conservative or traditionally liberal opposition but by their own graduation from the universities. And theirs was merely a temporary defeat. They and their ideology are all around us now.

That ideology has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment industry, and popular culture; it has helped to subvert museums and other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: it has perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.

By the late 1970s, after fantasies of overt political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to undertake the “long march through the institutions.” The phrase, popularized by the German New Leftist Rudi Dutschke, is often attributed to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci—an unimpeachable authority for countercultural standard-bearers. But of course the phrase also carries the aura of an even higher authority: that of Mao Tse-tung and his long march and cultural revolution.

In the context of Western societies, “the long march through the institutions” signified—in the words of Herbert Marcuse—”working against the established institutions while working in them.” It was primarily by this means—by insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation—that the countercultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed. Bellbottoms, long hair, and incense were dispensable props; crucial was the hedonistic antinomianism they symbolized. In this sense, countercultural radicalism has come more and more to define the dominant culture even as the memory of student strikes and demonstrations fades under the distorting glaze of nostalgia. For examples, you need look no further than the curriculum of your local school or college, at what is on offer at the nearest museum or radio station: indeed, you need look no further than your workplace, your church (if you still go to church), or your family to see evidence of the damage wrought by the long march of the counterculture. The radical ethos of the Sixties can be felt throughout public and private life, from the most ordinary domestic situations all the way up the political ladder: consider, for example, the career of Joschka Fischer Sixties radical turned German Foreign Minister.

The grisly political history of the recent past also reminds us of the extent to which the totalitarian impulse appeals to liberation in its effort to expunge genuine liberty. Again and again we have seen the promise of liberation dissolve into outright tyranny. The totalitarian impulse occupies a prominent place in most revolutionary movements, cultural as well as political. Think, for example, of the Marxist-inspired tyranny visited upon Russia in 1917 or the megalomaniacal Rousseauvian variety that tore France apart in 1789. Indeed, the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of pursuing conformity while praising freedom.

It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips. But freedom for him was a chilly abstraction; it applied to mankind as an idea, not to individual men. “I think I know man,” Rousseau sadly observed near the end of his life, “but as for men, I know them not.” In the Confessions, he claimed to be “drunk on virtue.” And indeed, it turned out that “virtue” for Rousseau had nothing to do with acting or behaving in a certain way toward others. On the contrary, the criterion of virtue was his subjective feeling of goodness. For Rousseau, as for the countercultural radicals who followed him, “feeling good about yourself” was synonymous with moral rectitude. Actually behaving well was irrelevant if not, indeed, a sign of “inauthenticity” because it suggested a concern for conventional approval. Virtue in this Rousseauvian sense is scarcely distinguishable from moral intoxication.

Establishing the reign of virtue is no easy task, as Rousseau’s avid disciple Maximilien Robespierre discovered to his chagrin. All those “particular wills”—i.e., individual men and women with their diverse aims and desires—are so recalcitrant and so ungrateful for one’s efforts to make them virtuous. Still, one does what one can to convince them to conform. And the guillotine, of course, is a great expedient. Robespierre was no political philosopher. But he understood the nature of Rousseau’s idea of virtue with startling clarity, as he showed when he spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is a remark worthy of Lenin, and a grim foreshadowing of the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that informed a great deal of Sixties radicalism.

I mention Rousseau here because, acknowledged or not, he is an important intellectual and moral grandfather of so much that happened in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. (Important “fathers” include Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.) Rousseau’s narcissism and megalomania, his paranoia, his fantastic political ideas and sense of absolute entitlement, his sentimentalizing nature-worship, even his twisted, hypertrophied eroticism: all reappeared updated in the tumult of the 1960s. And so did the underlying totalitarian impulse that informs Rousseau’s notion of freedom.

The glorification of such spurious freedom is closely connected with another misuse of language—one of the most destructive: the description of irresponsible political na‹vet‚ as a form of “idealism.” Nor is it only naïveté that gets the extenuating absolution of “idealism.” So do all manner of crimes, blunders, and instances of brutality: all can be morally sanitized by the simple expedient of being rebaptized as examples of (perhaps misguided) “idealism.” The one essential qualification is that the perpetrator be identified with the political Left. In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt—who was certainly no enemy of the Left herself—cannily observed that

one has often been struck by the peculiar selflessness of the revolutionists, which should not be confused with “idealism” or heroism. Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever since Robespierre preached a virtue that was borrowed from Rousseau, and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its indelible stamp upon the revolutionary man and his innermost conviction that the value of a policy may be gauged by the extent to which it will contradict all particular interests, and that the value of a man may be judged by the extent to which he acts against his own interest and against his own will.

In fact, the “peculiar selflessness” that Arendt describes often turns out to be little more than an abdication of individual responsibility abetted by utter self-absorption. It is a phenomenon that, among other things, helps to explain the queasy-making spectacle of left-wing Western intellectuals falling over themselves in a vain effort to excuse, mitigate, or sometimes simply deny the crimes of the Soviet Union and other murderous left-wing regimes throughout the Cold War and beyond. Perhaps we can admit that Stalin (or Mao or Pol Pot or Fidel or whoever) was repressive (or maybe that is just an ugly rumor propagated by the United States); perhaps he “went too far”; maybe some measures were “extreme”; this or that policy was “misjudged”; . . . but omelettes require breaking a few eggs, . . . and besides what glorious ideas are equality, community, the brotherhood of man . . . going beyond capitalistic greed, mere selfish individualism, repressive patriarchal society based on inequitable division of labor, etc., etc. The odor of piety that attends these rituals of exculpation is almost as disagreeable as the aura of grotesque unreality that emanates from them.

One sees the same thing in another key in the left-liberal response to cultural revolution of the 1960s. Tariq Ali’s essay is a case in point. Whatever criticisms might be made of the counterculture, they are quickly neutralized by invoking the totem of “idealism.” For example, one is regularly told that youth in the 1960s and 1970s, whatever its extravagances and sillinesses, had a “passionate belief” (the beliefs of radicals are never less than “passionate”) in a “better world,” in a “more humane society,” in “equality.”

The guiding assumption is that “passion” redeems moral vacuity, rendering it noble or at least exempting it from censure. This assumption, which is part of the Romantic background of the counterculture, is profoundly mistaken and destructive. As T. S. Eliot observed, the belief that there is “something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake, whatever the emotion or whatever the object,” is “a cardinal point of faith in a romantic age.” It is also, he noted, “a symptom of decadence.” For it is “by no means self-evident,” Eliot wrote,

that human beings are most real when they are most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state; and the passion has significance only in relation to the character and behavior of the man at other moments of his life and in other contexts. Furthermore, strong passion is only interesting or significant in strong men, those who abandon themselves without resistance to excitements which tend to deprive them of reason, become merely instruments of feeling and lose their humanity; and unless there is moral resistance and conflict there is no meaning.

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

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

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

One sign of that defeat has been the fate of the culture wars themselves. One hears considerably less about those battles today than a decade ago. That is partly because, as Robert Novak notes in his book Completing the Revolution, “moral issues tend to exhaust people over time.” Controversies that only yesterday sparked urgent debate today seem, for many, strangely beside the point. There is also the issue of material abundance. For if the Sixties were an assault on the moral substance of traditional culture, they nonetheless abetted the capitalist culture of accumulation. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are unimportant to the overall picture. Indeed, it happened that the cultural revolution was most damaging precisely where, in material terms, it was most successful. This put many conservatives in an awkward position. For conservatives have long understood that free markets and political liberty go together. What if it turned out that free markets plus the cultural revolution of the Sixties added up to moral and intellectual poverty?

It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among its natural sympathizers on the Left–Tariq Ali’s expostulation is silly but hardly unexpected–but, on the contrary, among those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may be that what the Sixties have wrought above all is widespread spiritual anesthesia. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between civilization and its discontents. That this loss goes largely unlamented and even unnoticed is a measure of how successful the long march of the cultural revolution has been.

Easter is the traditional time when the Catholic Church receives converts into the fold. It’s a stirring ceremony, as I know from witnessing the reception a few friends into the faith.

All souls are equal in the sight of God, but here on earth some converts elicit particular attention. The announcement yesterday that Magdi Allam, the 55-year-old an Egyptian-born Italian journalist, had converted from his native Islam to Catholic Christianity, is a case in point. Apostasy from Islam is, as my fellow PJM blogger Michael Ledeen points out, punishable by death if you happen to be in one of the many atavistic bulwarks of barbarism that make the Religion of Peace an object of obloquy among civilized people.

[UPDATE: Robert Spencer shows that, as usual, I was being too generous to the Religion of Peace. As Spencer explains, "all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that apostates must be executed. But don't take my word for it. Here's the great Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, who has been praised by John Esposito as a 'reformist':

That is why the Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi`i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-`ashriyyah, Al-Ja`fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed...]

This particular baptism is sure to arouse the ire of fanatical Muslims, but, as the blogger at Tigerhawk put it, kudos to the Pope for performing the service in public: “If the Roman church does not draw a line against Islamist intimidation, who will?”

Good question. While you ponder it, allow me to introduce a more meditative note. Last year at Easter, I posted this thought for the day about the mysterious subject of time; a few people have asked me about it, so I thought I would reproduce it on this chilly (but sunny) Easter morn:

“So long as no one asks me,” St. Augustine says, reflecting on the mystery of time in Confessions, “I know what it is. But as soon as I try to say what time is I am baffled”

Well, St. Augustine has many interesting things to say about time in Book XI of Confessions, and he is perhaps most interesting (if also least helpful) when he wonders whether time is somehow “an extension of the mind itself”–most interesting because it is clear that our experience of time is deeply implicated with the movements of our mind, that it differs radically from one moment, and one phase of life to the next. But St. Augustine’s suggestion is also not particularly helpful when it comes to one of life’s most awful facts: that time passes, sweeping all that is “contains” (right word?) before it.

In a used book shop somewhere a couple of years ago I picked up a book enticingly called Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older. Published by Cambridge University Press, it’s by a Dutch psychologist called Douwe Draaisma, and it is full of interesting facts and speculations about (as the book’s subtitle puts it”) “how memory shapes our past.” (How indeed: “Memory,” Draasima quotes the Dutch aphorist Cees Nooteboom as saying, “is like a dog that lies down where it pleases.”)

Easter, whatever else it is, is a festival about time’s passing–taking that phrase in all the rich multiplicity implied in “passing.” (When time has passed, what is left?) Draasisma’s book presents lots of fascinating psychological case studies. Much briefer, yet unaccountably more poignant, is this little poem I discovered in one of John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Crackers. It is, he tells us, inscribed on the pendulum of a clock in a church in Kent.

When as a child I laughed and wept
Time crept.
When as a youth I dreamed and talked
Time walked.
When I became a full-grown man
Time ran.
And later as I older grew
Time flew.
Soon shall I find when traveling on
Time gone.
Will Christ have saved my soul by then?
Amen.

An apposite question for this Easter morning.

My friend Stefan Beck has just written a tart piece about my friend Tim Goeglein’s unfortunate habit of lifting other people’s words in some columns he wrote for The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. When the story broke a few weeks ago, there was a delighted wailing and gnashing of teeth (an image I take from Matthew 8:11-12). The delight increased when it was revealed that Tim had not only appropriated some paragraphs from Stefan’s and my friend Jeff Hart (yes, Virginia, there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy) but also had thus helped himself in 20 of 38 columns (I take this number from the News-Sentinel). Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Tim instantly apologized–he wrote me that “I am 100 percent guilty, 100 percent wrong”–and was forced to resign a few days later. I suspect many would have preferred that he hang on a few days longer: a public target is much more fun to torment than one who has slunk off in ignominious retreat. I wonder if anyone has meditated on the curious dynamics of contrition? It is not a solo activity. Like the tango, it takes two (I take the image from a 1952 song). Being sorry creates a sort of emotional vacuum which is filled when met by corresponding glee emitted from a grateful public. Only then is equilibrium reestablished. Perhaps this is why it is said that among the many pleasures enjoyed by souls in paradise is the pleasure of contemplating the miseries of the damned (I take this from Nietzsche, who took it from Tertullian). In any event, a little cottage industry instantly sprung up around the case of T. S. Goeglein, plagiarist. One clever chap with impressive computer skills and a lot of time on his hands even posted an interactive “Goeglein map” detailing the relationship between Tim and his various sources.

Now, I enjoy the pleasures of righteous indignation as much as the next chap. I couldn’t get too excited about this tort, however, even though it turns out I was one of Tim’s, um, sources (I take this revelation from an article by Ashley Smith in The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel). It’s not that I think Tim’s behavior was defensible. I don’t. But in the calendar of intellectual malefactions, department of misappropriation, it seemed pretty minor. I mean, it wasn’t as if Tim had swiped the cure for cancer and peddled it as his own. His behavior, though wrong, even had at least one subsidiary benefit: the columns of The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, bolstered by anonymous contributions from Jeff Hart, Robert P. George, Fareed Zakaria, George Weigel–not to mention R. Kimball and other luminaries–must have improved markedly.

These days, plagiarism is a Cardinal Sin in the academy. Of course, it’s always been frowned upon, but it’s my sense that the level of opprobrium that surrounds it has risen noticeably in recent years. Perhaps this is partly because, with nearly universal access to the internet, it is so much easier to plagiarize now than before. (Though the internet may make successful plagiarism more difficult: Mary Ann, co-ed–can I say that?–finds it easy to get a ready-made paper on just about anything on the internet, but Mr. Chipps, Ph.D., finds it correspondingly easy to find her out.) Possibly plagiarism seems a more scarlet violation these days because so many other intellectual vices–deliberate obscurity, political tendentiousness, general vacuousness–get a free pass.

Speaking of intellectual vices naturally reminds me of the philosopher Hegel. I was once teaching a class on The Phenomenology of Spirit, one of the most impenetrable documents ever produced by the human mind. When it came time for the class to write a paper on the book, one of my students, a clever and articulate young lady, turned in a paper in which whole paragraphs from the Phenomenology appeared verbatim and without quotation marks.

I was, I admit, a little taken aback. Here was one of the brightest students in the class: why would she do this? It saddened me to think she thought I wouldn’t notice. I brought it up when we met to discuss her paper and she seemed genuinely nonplussed. The similarity between Hegel’s words and hers was entirely accidental, inadvertent, she would never have deliberately copied words from the great philosopher. It might be said that it would be a far greater fault actually to think and write like Hegel than merely to copy out what he wrote. But that wasn’t the issue. In the end, I decided that the plagiarism really was semi-inadvertent and let it go. Today, that student, were she caught, would almost certainly have failed the course. She might even have been expelled and sent to work in the campaign of Barrack Hussein Obama, where her skill would have come in handy.

Good poets, said T.S. Eliot, do not borrow, they steal. (Though someone told me Eliot took the line, without attribution, from Tennyson). The Waste Land is a tissue of unattributed quotations. It appears now with Eliot’s own footnotes, but when originally published it had none. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is notoriously a tapestry of plagiarisms, most notably from Schelling, a writer even more hermetic than Hegel. (Even Hegel knew something was wrong with Schelling: his notion of the absolute, quoth Hegel in his one amusing remark, was “that night in which all cows are black”). I have been reading a lot of Kipling lately. “Recessional,” written in 1897 for Victoria’s Diamond Jubliee, is widely (and rightly) acknowledged as one of Kipling’s masterpieces. It is obviously laden with Biblical references. It is not always noticed, however, that it also contains a line that any vigilant counter-plagiarist would pounce upon: “Beneath whose awful hand we hold/ Dominion over palm and pine–.” Compare that with Emerson’s couplet: “And grant to dwellers with the pine/ Dominion o’er the palm and vine.” (I hasten to admit that I appropriate this bit of detective work from David Gilmour’s The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling.) All of which means–what? I am not sure. It is certainly true that people oughtn’t to fob off other people’s work as their own. And yet many writers get their start from cold-blooded assimilation. In Les Mots, his autobiography, Sartre tells us how he began writing as a child:

The first story I completed was entitled For a Butterfly. A scientist, his daughter, and an athletic young explorer sailed up the Amazon in search of a precious butterfly. The argument, the characters, the particulars of the adventures, and even the title were borrowed from a story in pictures that had appeared in the preceding quarter. This cold-blooded [Oh no, didn't I just say "cold blooded"?] plagiarism freed me from my remaining misgivings. . . . Did I take myself for an imitator? No, but for an original author.

I can imagine some people arguing that it would have been far better if Sartre confined himself to copying out adventure stories instead of striking out on his own, but that is another subject.

It used to be that much literary creation was frankly re-creation. There were a handful of stories, and the trick was to recycle them in some compelling way. Our culture, heir to the Romantics, puts a great premium on “originality.” The quotation marks are deliberate, since hardly anyone is really original, though no one likes to admit it. (Really, we continue to recycle a fairly confined number of stories, though we don’t always notice.) Anyway, I’d wager The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel is a bit lackluster these days.

What year is it? A friend suggested that, politically, it was round about 1936. The signs are all there, the writing is on the wall, but we seem too distracted from distraction by distraction (as T.S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets) to heed the warnings.

A few do. In his latest column, “Strategic Intention and Mass Man,” J. R. Nyquist, has a thoughtful and deeply troubling piece on the culpable weakness of the masses and the resurgence of Soviet-style aggression by Russia under Putin (forget the recent election: Russia is still ruled by Vladimir Putin). The tenor of the piece is already clear from its epigraph:

“I looked into Putin’s eyes, and I saw three things, a ‘K’ a ‘G’ and a ‘B,’”
– John McCain

Mr. Nyquist draws some revealing and admonitory parallels between the mass men of the past, who proved such pliable fodder for the totalitarian ambitions of the twentieth century, and the mass men of today, that “susceptible” creature who “is fundamentally ignorant, though remarkably “well informed.” Mass man’s inertia accepts the dictates of bureaucracy. He has no “great idea” or “faith” to guard him against expedient compromise, or participation in genocide.”

The decadence of culture is part of the story. “Once upon a time,” Nyquist writes,

we had a civilization. We had standards. We had notions of objectivity. We had a culture that wasn’t low-minded. We looked back to great men as we looked forward to our posterity. Art was beautiful and meaningful. Politics was evolving away from tyranny. Economics was about liberty and responsibility. What do we have today? We have Britney Spears and Jerry Springer. Our standards are seriously eroded. Subjectivity has cynically declared that objectivity is impossible. Everything high-minded has fallen to neglect.

But more important, and even more disastrous, the emergence of “mass man” has something to do with the emergence of totalitarianism (which claimed roughly 100 million lives in the last century). And it is safe to say that totalitarianism is going to claim even more lives in the future. But people don’t want to wake up. They don’t want to acknowledge that totalitarianism is something real and ongoing. It grows in the soil of mass culture. It leads to destruction and mass murder because every totalitarian construct is based on lies, sustained by crime and driven by the politicization of personal disappointment and envy. It is normal history when one country invades another, when a cavalry commander or Indian chief commits an atrocity. Men have done terrible things to one another throughout history. But to make terror and murder into a system signifies a new type of regime.

The mass man fails to see the evils of totalitarianism; he fails to see the tendency of Mr. Hitler; he fails to see the letters “K-G-B” behind Putin; he denies the Holocaust; he doesn’t care if Iran deploys nuclear missiles; he doesn’t think Russia or China will ever start a global war. The philistinism of the mass man is found in his readiness to believe totalitarian propaganda. Such is a propaganda that blames the intended victim.

What year is yet? I said 1936. That was a moment when decisive action might still have made a difference. Do we have the wit and character to act today? I wonder. I wonder, too, if I didn’t mistake the year: perhaps it is closer to 1938.

Do people like bad news? Do they welcome the prospect of catastrophe? Listening to the din of economic doomsayers, I have to wonder. Henry James once spoke of “the imagination of diaster.” He wasn’t thinking of economic disaster, exactly, but the phrase seems custom made for the crop of amateur Chicken Littles running around skirling that the sky is falling, the sky is falling (and the stock market, too).

I would be the first to acknowledge that what I know about the “dismal science” could be inscribed on the head of a pin, and not a very capacious pin, either. But I wonder how much deeper is the knowledge of economics on the part of the punditry. You cannot open a newspaper or turn on a television news show these days with out being greeted by some Bobby Sue gleefully explaining that the U.S. economy is in recession, that the worst is yet to come, and that economic Armageddon is right around the corner. Stay tuned for an update at 10:00 p.m., live from the trading floor. The last time I checked, a “recession” meant 2 consecutive quarters of negative growth. The U.S. hasn’t had a single quarter of negative growth in recent memory, so the only recession we’re in, so far anyway, is a recession populated by the imagination of disaster.

Who knows? It seems pretty clear that the geniuses who paraded up and down the land shoving mortgages into the hands of anyone who would sit still have helped precipitate a mess. It would be interesting to know why banks made so many “ninja” loans (loans made to people with no verifiable income and no assets). Greed? Maybe. But I’ll bet you a nickel that political pressure to “open up” the lending process played a part, too. Doubtless even as I write, someone in Washington is framing legislation to further strangle. . . . oops, I mean “regulate” the financial industry.

One of things you hear about a lot these days is “consumer confidence.” Well, when you have the media bringing you scenarios of disaster 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, what effect do you reckon that has on people’s confidence?

For a long time people have been warning that the stock market is over-valued. Well, OK. So now the current drop, perhaps it is settling in to where it should be. My own suspicion is that “this too shall pass,” and perhaps sooner than many of our pundits believe. Betting on the American economy is usually a pretty good wager. But don’t expect to see rosy bulletins emerging from the press when we have a turn around. Especially if (as I expect) the White House continues to be occupied by a Republican, good news will be ignored or explained away, while every scrap of bad news will be amplified and repeated ad nauseam.

John Gray has a long and thoughtful piece in The Guardian about the recent spate of books proselytizing atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al.) and why they are, if not wrong, exactly, at least incomplete. I generally find Gray maddeningly woolly and evasive, and I believe he wanders off the reservation now and again in this piece. Still, it is much worth reading, not least for its peroration:

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

Even as some Westerners are beginning to wake up to the progress of soft jihad and “sharia creep” (and here), it is worth noting that radical Islam continues to make conspicuous strides in coopting Western institutions and legal instruments to undermine the reality of Western liberty. Consider, to take just one example, the summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference which ended Friday in Dakar, Senegal. An Associated Press report has the details:

The Muslim world has created a battle plan to defend its religion from political cartoonists and bigots.

Concerned about what they see as a rise in the defamation of Islam, leaders of the world’s Muslim nations are considering taking legal action against those that slight their religion or its sacred symbols. It was a key issue during a two-day summit that ended Friday in this western Africa capital.

The Muslim leaders are attempting to demand redress from nations like Denmark, which allowed the publication of cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in 2006 and again last month, to the fury of the Muslim world.

Let’s see, “redress” for publishing cartoons about a 7th-century religious figure? For “slighting” a religion? While you ponder that, here’s some more of the AP report:

Though the legal measures being considered have not been spelled out, the idea pits many Muslims against principles of freedom of speech enshrined in the constitutions of numerous Western governments.

“I don’t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy,” said Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade, the chairman of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference. “There can be no freedom without limits.”

My nomination for the Understatement of the Week Award: “the idea pits many Muslims against principles of freedom of speech.” You might say that. But the more sinister thing comes with President Wade’s comment: he is certainly correct that “there can be no freedom without limits.” James Madison or John Locke might have said something similar–but with very different intent. The question (well, one question) is, where does one draw the line? And who is enfranchised to do the drawing? If a Danish paper publishes a caricature of Muhammad, should Denmark, or the paper, or the cartoonist responsible be liable to an offended Muslim in Senegal?

What makes this little pow-wow among “leaders of the world’s Muslim nations” significant is not what might follow from it in the way of positive legislation–though you never know–but rather what it betokens as a sign of the times. It is part of a large if still more or less amorphous mobilization of anti-Western sentiment on the part of people who detest Western mores but crave its wealth and Lebensraum. It is not at all clear that we have formulated any compelling response. Mostly what we find are anodyne bleatings like those of Sada Cumber, U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, who kept trying to burnish “America’s image” in Muslim countries and find what the AP called “common ground” with Muslim nations by championing “universal values the U.S. holds dear like religious tolerance and freedom of speech.” Gee whiz. “America has a deep respect for the religion of Islam,” Cumber said. “The freedom of faith that we exercise, that we enjoy in America, that is also a very important aspect of the American core values. Anyone who wants to practice any faith is never stopped or discouraged.”

Dear, dear, dear, Mr. Cumber. Don’t you see that your interlocutors in Senegal do not regard religious freedom or freedom of speech as “universal values”? They regard them as part of the decadent legacy of the West. Don’t think so? Ponder the fatwa, dated March 14, issued by “Saudi Arabia’s most revered cleric” which maintains that two writers who questioned some tenets of Sunni Islam “should be tried” and, if they fail to repent, “should be killed as an apostate from the religion of Islam.”

Glenn Reynolds points to a brief but important comment by Arnold Kling about the phenomenon of Eliot Spitzer. “The term ‘Spitzer’ belongs in the dictionary,” Mr. Kling observes, “and its definition should be ‘any politician.’ We ought to think of all politicians as Spitzers. No, they don’t all have lurid involvements with prostitutes. But they all have an inflated view of their superiority over the rest of us.”

Mr. Kling rightly identifies all the major candidates for the Presidency of the United States as real or aspiring Spitzers, and he usefully points out that the press has performed yeoman’s service in the role of Spitzer’s wife: “someone who tolerates and enables abuse by a Spitzer.”

Mr. Kling makes the further point that while the talk shows are entertaining us with ribald mockery of Eliot Spitzer’s sexual proclivities, we should really be mocking –and constraining–the Spitzers of the world for their abuse of political power and statist intrusion into our daily lives. “Whether it is ‘cleaning up Wall Street’ or ‘giving everyone health care,’” Mr. Kling observes, “the Spitzers are making extravagant promises that only result in expanded government power.”

Mr. Kling has some sound practical advice:

Whenever the subject of politics comes up in conversation, try to bring up the name Spitzer. Yes, he’s a real Spitzer all right.

The Spitzers in the legislature say they need to spend more of our money this year? What happened, did the Empereror’s Club raise their rates again?

That Spitzer wants to tell me what light bulb I have to buy? You tell Spitzer what socket he can stick it in.

Quite right. In fact, Mr. Kling’s amusing admonitions have pertinence far beyond the realm of electoral politics. The virus of Spitzerism has infected not only politicians on the national stage. It has also infected the broader fraternity of policy actors in our society: the petty bureaucrats who determine whether you get a fishing license or a permit to renovate your garage; the school administrator who makes selling a packet of candy a crime; the taxpayer-funded clerks whom you pay to spend their days thinking up new ways to spend your money (they don’t think of it as yours, but it really is) and new ways to make buying or driving a car, sailing a boat, smoking a cigar, ordering a glass of wine, enjoying a dinner of foie gras, writing an article, hiring someone to work for you, or making an investment more onerous if not, indeed, illegal.

At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that, at bottom, freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, “‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Of course, few canny bureaucrats quote Lenin today. The stock of that totalitarian genius is too deeply depressed by his association with Communist tyranny. But really, the Spitzers of the world are, as someone said about Philip Rahv, born-again Leninists. “What socialism implies above all,” said Lenin, “is keeping account of everything.” Could Eliot Spitzer or Patrick Fitzgerald or Michael Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama have put it better? Keeping track of your health care, disposing of your money, regulating your food and drink and ration of tobacco: there they all are, ready, able, and willing to run your life for you. Just sign here to dispose of the power to manage your own life responsibly, to make decisions as an independent citizen who is responsible for your own welfare, and those displaced nannies will take care of . . . everything.

The spectacle of Eliot Spitzer’s implosion has provided a good deal of tawdry tabloid entertainment. But really, what matters about Spitzer is not his taste in whores or even his byzantine arrangements for paying them. What matters are–we can now gratefully employ the preterit and say “were”–his actions as a public figure. He recklessly employed the power of the state partly to aggrandize himself, but more dangerously to insinuate state power into areas where it has no business intruding. Probably, few politicians are paid up members of The Emperors’ Club. But how many patronize that other, more amorphous club of emperors, the one staffed by democratic despots whose overwhelming imperative is to relieve individuals of responsibility for themselves, transforming them from free citizens into clients of an increasingly bureaucratized, and increasingly insatiable, state apparatus.

As Andrew McCarthy has noted, the important issue regarding Eliot Spitzer’s abuse of prosecutorial power was not the extent but the irresponsible deployment of that power. “The power wielded by prosecutors is immense,” McCarthy acknowledged, but he went on to observe that

It has to be that way because it is the public’s power, a key ingredient to the order liberty requires if it is to thrive. Still, the prosecutor must bear in mind that the power is a trust, not a personal arsenal. Those who miss that distinction–or, worse, ride roughshod over it–are more apt to leave lives and reputations in ruin than to protect the public welfare.

What we have seen in recent years is a hideous marriage of political correctness and bureaucratic triumphalism. The offspring are the multitude of soft tyrannies we see all about us today–that and an enervation of spirit that renders the public ever less able to respond to the casual indignities that have become such a prominent part of daily life. “Excuse me, Mrs. Smith, please take off your shoes and place them by themselves in a container on the conveyor belt. We don’t go in for racial profiling, so would you mind stepping over here so this new state employee can pat you down to be sure you aren’t carrying any Semtex today. And no, you may not bring that bottle of water or shampoo or those knitting needles aboard.” Of course, Mrs. Smith meekly obeys every order, submits without cavil to every indignity. Obedience to Authority in action? Partly. But there is something else abroad today, something more threatening to our way of life if less psychologically piquant. The immolation of Eliot Spitzer has offered plenty of lascivious distraction. Fine. But it’s time to look beyond his unseemly animal needs to the deeper obscenity of his unfettered moralism. Time magazine once featured Spitzer as “Crusader of the Year.” Quoth James Carville in 2002: “You in New York are so blessed to have an attorney general who just showed what it was like to be a Democrat.” I don’t often agree with James Carville, but this time he hit the nail on the head. I only wish that the disease were confined to Democrats. It isn’t.

A coda on Skittles: Doubtless a reader will comment, “But that New Haven school that suspended an 8th-grader, barred him from attending an honors dinner, and stripped him of his title as class vice-president because he was caught with a packet of Skittles has rescinded the punishments. As an AP wire story puts it, “Conn. School Backs Off Candy Punishment.” While that is good news for the poor teenager, it is not exactly heartening. The issue was not that the school administrators, faced with a firestorm of public opprobrium for their actions, should back down, but that they should have felt justified in acting as they did in the first place. Indeed, their “clemency” has the rotten smell that attends every act of authoritarian largess.

[Update: A reader writes to remind me that "Skittles was the nickname of Victorian England's best rewarded courtesan." Obviously, there are wheels within wheels . . .]