Being a fastidious sort of chap, I rarely touch a copy of The New York Times these days. Various stories filter down through the internet; people send me links to this or that item; but I am generally spared direct physical contact. When visiting certain friends in Northwest Connecticut, however, it is part of my routine to rise early and fetch the papers, including the Times from a local purveyor. So I was the first in the household to see what John Podhoretz rightly called the “preposterous” front-page story about the Pentagon’s “hidden hand” that allegedly manipulates reporting on military affairs the way a puppet master manipulates his creatures. (Max Boot has more on the story here.)

I tossed the paper on the kitchen table and waited for a reaction from my host, a politically mature individual who continues to get the Times as an adjunct to his work as a political pathologist. I didn’t have long to wait. His eye fell on the paper.” Can you believe this?” he asked, absorbing the headline. The story featured photographs of six experts with (dread phrase!) “ties to the military” splashed across the front-page of the paper as if they were candidates for the FBI’s most wanted list. Below was a long, hand-wringing piece indited in the best Pentagon-Papers-all-in-the-public’s-best-interest Times style:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times [Really? I'd love to see the numbers on that] on television and radio as “military analysts” [why the quotation marks? Does the Times writer doubt that they are military analysts?] whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments [Can't you just hear the BUT screaming around the corner?] about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus ["apparatus" is good but a "hidden apparatus" is even better because more threatening: you need that old journalist's terrier instinct to dig up and expose a "hidden apparatus"] that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Et very much cetera. My favorite line in the whole sorry tale was “an examination by The New York Times has found.” Right. Like the examination by The New York Times that found plenty of evidence to indict those Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused of raping a black stripper. Or maybe it would be like the examination by The New York Times whose front-page headline implied that John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist but whose text carried denials from all parties. Or maybe it would be like that examination by The New York Times informing the world that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were far more likely to be brought up on charges of homicide than the general public. That turned out to be the opposite of the truth, but for partisans of the Times it doesn’t seem to matter. What they want is not news but ideological solace. And that is something the Times supplies in never-ending profusion.

“Never-ending”? Well, that is probably too pessimistic. I predict that it will end, possibly a lot sooner than many observers suspect. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, the inimitable Taki Theodoracopoulos threw a huge party in London to celebrate the fall of that monstrous tyranny. One friend of mine suggests that we begin planning now for an “end of the Times” party, sending out periodic pre-invitations to the crowd of grateful souls assuring them the date will be forthcoming soon. Can it be far off? It wouldn’t require that the Times actually go out of business, only that its increasing irrelevance to the world of news and cultural reporting be more broadly recognized. That recognition is already burgeoning in some quarters–in the world of finance and advertising, for example. “The New York Times Co. lost $335,000 in the first quarter as advertising revenues slumped,” the paper reported a week ago, noting that March ad revenues dropped by a whopping 11.1 percent. The friend who sent me that cheery item said he was setting it as the wallpaper on his computer monitor. I know how he feels. More to the point, many, many others do as well.

The power to tax, said John Marshall, is the power to destroy. Jerry Pournelle (via Instapundit) has some thoughts on Black Tuesday (that would be April 15):

I discovered to my horror just how much the Feds tax retirement including Social Security! Having collected taxes for my lifetime — including to this day — on self-employment to pay into the Social Security account, they hand me a miserable pittance compared to what I would have got had I simply put the money into a money market account; then they tax part of it away.

Same with retirement accounts. They tax Roberta’s State Teacher’s Retirement income. They tax my TIAA retirement income from my academic years. Incidentally, a few years of TIAA/CREF generated a very sizable fraction of the income I get from Social Security from paying into that all my life. I have taken the “minimum distribution” option from TIAA, so I could get a lot more; my theory is that Mr. Heinlein was right, we writers are professional gamblers, and it’s well to have your house and car paid for and sock something away for a bad year, because you are likely to have one. Robert ran scared all his life.

Clearly the government wants us to spend ourselves broke and throw ourselves on welfare. Then they will stop fining us every year. They fine us for speeding, for spitting in the streets, for doing things they don’t want us to do: they also fine us for improving our property, investing money to grow the economy, saving money; the implications are pretty clear?

Actually, of course, it’s just that government employees consider themselves entitled to annual raises whatever they may accomplish for us, and that means they consider themselves entitled to a share of any money that can be found anywhere in the world. It’s not that they want to fine you for saving money: it’s that you have saved money, and there’s some out there, and government employees are entitled to have raises, Q.E.D. See the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. If money exists, government considers itself entitled to it, and if you ask why, they have no answer except blank stares: after all, it’s obvious isn’t it? Good grief!

Depressing, isn’t it?

I was just about to sit down to write about Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student whose senior project, The Yale Daily News reported yesterday, was a piece of performance art that recorded “a nine-month process during which [Shvarts] artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as prepared collections of the blood from the process.”

Disgusting, no? The explosion of outrage in the blogosphere yesterday showed that there was considerable unanimity about that.

Well, it seems that Shvarts was lying–perpetrating a “hoax” is the way it is being reported. “The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body,” a Yale University spokeswoman said, relief wafting off the page as a public relations disaster is narrowly avoided.

That news made me feel a little better. But not much. Why? Peter Wolfgang, the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, put his finger on part of the reason: “I’m astounded by this woman’s callousness,” Wolfgang said. “There are thousands of women in this country who are dealing with the pain of having had an abortion, with the trauma of having suffered a miscarriage. For her to make light of that for her own purposes is just beyond words.”

True, true. And there is the further wrinkle that Shvarts is sticking by her original story–more or less. According to a piece in today’s Yale Daily News, Shvarts replied that the University’s statement about her work was “ultimately inaccurate.”

“Ultimately,” eh?

The Daily News report went on to note that Shvarts

reiterated that she engaged in the nine-month process she publicized on Wednesday in a press release that was first reported in the News: repeatedly using a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself, then taking abortifacient herbs at the end of her menstrual cycle to induce bleeding. Thursday evening, in a tour of her art studio, she shared with the News video footage she claimed depicted her attempts at self-induced miscarriages.

“No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,” Shvarts said, adding that she does not know whether she was ever pregnant. “The nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Well, that is not quite accurate. Certainly, the whole idea of the “piece” was morally repellent. Certainly, Yale’s response was a masterpiece of evasion. “Had these acts been real,” their statement continued, “they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.” You don’t say? Here’s a question: what action would Yale be prepared to take if it turns out that Shvarts has “violated” the above mentioned “basic ethical standards”? And what, by the way, was the standard being violated? I wonder, for example, whether the Yale spokesman would say that abortion itself violated a basic ethical standard? Or maybe the violation requires first deliberately impregnating oneself? (But why would that affect the “basic ethical standard” involved?) Or maybe it was videotaping the performance that was the problem?

I know that in the universe occupied by Ivy League academics, the spectacle of a woman repeatedly inseminating herself, quaffing abortifacient drugs (”herbal”ones, though: we’re all organic environmentalists here), and then video taping the resultant mess poses a problem. I mean, in that universe there really are basic ethical standards: Thou shalt not smoke, for example. Thou shalt not support support the war in Iraq. Thou shalt not vote Republican. There really are some things that are beyond the pale.

But when it comes to “art”: oh, that’s a tricky one. Shvarts “is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” the Yale spokeswoman said. But doesn’t it depend on the nature of the performance?

Today’s Yale Daily News has some details:

[W]hile some news stories late Thursday dismissed Shvarts’s exhibition as a wholesale hoax, the Davenport senior showed elements of her planned exhibition to News reporters, including footage from tapes she plans to play at the exhibit. The tapes depict Shvarts, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, alone in a shower stall bleeding into a cup. It was all part of a project that Shvarts said had the backing of the dean of her residential college and at least two faculty members within the School of Art.

Aliza Shvarts may be a kind of genius when it comes to generating publicity for herself. But I believe her performance, whether or not it involved real semen and abortifacients, was morally repugnant. (It would be much worse if it did, of course, but then we enter into the realm of serious mental pathology not to say–let me employ an old-fashioned word here–sin.) The invocation of “art” doesn’t change that one whit. Indeed, as a society, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something “art” we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism–as if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations beside the point. George Orwell gave classic expression to this point back in 1944 in “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí,” a review of Dalí’s autobiography. “The artist,” Orwell wrote,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things graphic shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

A juror in the obscenity trial over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, he nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”

“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that terrifying comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps–just possibly–Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

Is this helpful? A nuclear attack on Washington, DC is “inevitable” according to Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, who spoke before a Senate Committee on Homeland Security. “I think it’s wistful to think that it won’t happen by 20 years.” (H/T Instapundit.)

Maybe it’s wistful, i.e. “full of melancholy yearning, longing pensively” to think otherwise. But does even the director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense know that such a horror is “inevitable,” i.e., “incapable of being avoided or prevented”? Of course not. Of course, it might happen. And I’d even agree with Mr. Dallas that the proliferation of nuclear weapons increases the odds. But “inevitable” is a strong, indeed an irresponsible word, a word that smacks of fear-mongering and unhelpful scare tactics. I suspect Mr. Dallas is like a doctor who looks at the world through the eyes of his speciality: if your a dermatologist of a certain temperament, all of humanity looks like a skin disease waiting to happen. And if you are a director of an Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense, you are likely to over estimate the chances of mass destruction. Sure, we should prepare for the worst, but we should also realize that historical inevitability is a Hegelian-Marxist fantasy, unbecoming of adult speculation about the real world.

We tend to think of historical facts as being among the most durable of intellectual properties. Facts, most of us assume, cannot simply wished away: they have a recalcitrance, an ontological weight that is greater than mere opinion.

Would that it were so simple. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in “Truth and Politics” (reprinted in her book Between Past and Future ), “Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories–even the most wildly speculative ones–produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back.”

Hence the importance of cultivating a respect for historical fact, of protecting its integrity from the corrosive onslaughts of political prerogative. “Accustom your children,” Dr. Johnson told Boswell, “constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.”

One example of where it will end was just offered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, in some remarks about the terrorist attacks of September 11. “Four or five years ago,” he said in a televised speech, a suspect event took place in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3000 people had been killed, whose names were never published. Under this pretext they (the US) attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then a million people have been killed.”

Well, there is nothing new in Ahmadinejad’s mendacious froth. You can find the same sort of politically motivated disregard for–or rather, attack on–the truth in many places, no least in the humanities departments of Western universities. Is there any point in objecting? “Hey, the names are widely published?” In one sense you would be wasting your breath. Ahmadinejad is not going to be convinced because the truth of the matter was never at issue for him. But in another sense it is always wise to insist on the truth, however tedious the exercise becomes. Ahmadinejad’s statement is like an acid spill or a burst of deadly radioactivity. It contaminates and damages what it touches. We require, as Dr. Johnson reminded us, the reagent of truth if we are to escape unscathed.

What is it about the humble bow tie that drives leftists to distraction? It would probably take Carlyle’s Diogenes Teufelsdröckh to supply a satisfactory disquisition on the subject. I certainly can’t explain it. But I have long noted, and not infrequently delighted in, the phenomenon. Procure a modest strip of colored silk. Knot carefully under your collar, taking care to achieve the sprightly butterfly effect that Bertie Wooster cherished: Presto! You reduce the sweaty masses to jabbering incoherence. If you really want to cause pain, wear spectacles and drop in a literary allusion or a Latin phrase or two. Really, it drives them wild.

I can’t remember when I first noticed this gratifying Pavlovian response. It was quite some time ago, and it certainly prompted me to stock up on bow ties and eschew the ordinary long variety. But while I have long been aware that the bow tie acts as a ferocious irritant upon the politically immature, it is only recently that I have noticed that the combination of a bow tie and a dissenting perspective on some contentious subject produces instant frenzy. Last autumn, when Norman Mailer went to his reward, I posted here a highly critical piece on the old, wife-stabbing egomaniac. Result? A cataract of abusive comments, many of which seemed to be vastly more offended by my bow tie than by anything I had actually written.

My comments about Barack Obama’s Bitter Pill gambit have sparked an even more amusing outbreak of anti-bow-tie animus. Alas and alack, your faithful correspondent sadly reports that neither he nor his bow tie — his “snobby little yellow bow-tie” as one reader eloquently apostrophized — is popular among the Obamamaniacs. Even his eyeglasses — “intellectual round glasses” in the words of the same authority–failed to delight.

Well, Pol Pot didn’t like people who wore glasses either, and if he failed to make Cambodia safe from bow-tie-wearing chaps, that was probably only because he had inadequate exposure to that enlightened fashion accessory.

Watching the herd of independent minds in the grip of a tantrum is always amusing, and this little episode certainly offered some splendid moments. What struck me most powerfully, however, was the fact that many of my correspondents seemed to think I was criticizing their totem for being “elitist.” In fact, I meant to praise elitism. How can you tell? Well, clever hermeneuts will have noticed that the post is called “In Praise of Elitism.” That was the first hint. And then there was the fact that while I allowed that Obama’s bitter-small-town-gun-and-God-lovin’ remarks were “smug,” “self-righteous,” etc. (”blinkered, bigoted, emotionally impoverished, and otherwise odious”), I concluded that they were “not in any normal sense of the word ‘elitist.’”

To repeat: In my book, elitism, properly understood, is a positive thing. Although there was, in my view, plenty wrong with what Obama said, his offense was not elitism but anti-American animus. (As William Kristol observed, in San Francisco, Obama’s “mask slipped” and, for a moment, we all saw the unvarnished anti-American contempt his Harvard polish usually refracts.)

What I actually wrote didn’t matter, though. The script required that a bow-tie-and-glasses white fellow just had to criticize Obama for being elitist. If he failed to do so, no matter: just follow the script and pretend that he did.

There are so many gems of inarticulate rage among the responses that I hesitate to single out any one for special praise. All have their distinctive delights. But there really was something special about “bethincary” who concludes that “Your bow-tied, elitist self–may have heard condescension–pretty much because you’re a HRC supporter.” How can I break the news to her?

A tale of two headlines:

#1: “Jimmy Carter to Meet With Hamas Leader in Syria”

#2:”Israel snubs Carter, declines security help”

Do you suppose, just possibly, that there is a link between # 1 and # 2? The second story notes “Israel’s secret service has declined to assist U.S. agents guarding former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit in which Israeli leaders have shunned him, U.S. sources close to the matter said on Monday.”

Why would this be? Could it be a deficit of hospitality for a former U.S. President and (like Yasser Arafat) Nobel Peace Prize Winner?

Or do you suppose the fondness for Hamas displayed by the great military tactician and economic genius has something to do with Israel’s chillness?

Hamas, Hamas: what is Hamas, anyway? Well, according to “The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center,”

Hamas, which appears on the U.S. list of terror organizations, currently stands out as the organization leading the terrorist activity in the Palestinian Authority (PA), undermining the “Road Map”, and striving toward the liberation of the entire territory of so-called Palestine from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea by means of violence, terror, and armed confrontation

True, that organization is Israeli-based, so it is perhaps not entirely dispassionate. Here’s a bit from Wikipedia:

Hamas was created in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin of the Gaza wing of the Muslim Brotherhood at the beginning of the First Intifada. Best known for multiple suicide bombings and other attacks directed against civilians and Israeli military and security forces targets, Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The organization is widely described as antisemitic.

Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by Canada, Israel, Japan, and the United States, and is banned in Jordan. Australia and the United Kingdom list only the militant wing of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, as a terrorist organization. The European Union lists Hamas as a group ‘involved in terrorist attacks’ and has implemented restrictive measures against Hamas.

I suppose the jury is still out on whether Jimmy Carter was the worst President in U.S. history. His combination of general incompetence and unstoppable self-righteousness makes him a strong contender. But can even Bill Clinton outdo Carter for cringe-making post-Presidential blundering?

Everyone keeps telling us what a brilliant orator B. H. Obama is. I don’t see it. Maybe you have to be there and witness the performance in propria persona to feel the magic. Maybe (though we cannot say it) there’s just a whiff of Dr. Johnson’s dog about the enthusiasm. But on the page, anyway, Obama is pretty flat. Sloppy, too. Consider the now-infamous bitter-small-town guns and God routine from April 11:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Charity prevents me from scrutinizing this syntactic train wreck too closely. But I would like to object to the response it elicited–both the response from the punditocracy, whose countenance contracted in a single brow of woe to castigate Obama’s “elitism,” and Obama’s response to the response, which has been a set of variations on the Prufrockian theme “That’s not what I meant at all./ That’s not it, at all.”

Let me first say a word about “elitism.” When was it that “elitist” broke free and became an all-purposive negative epithet–a little semantic stink-bomb that, emptied of any definite meaning, is almost as potent as “racist” in bringing discussion to a grinding halt and clearing a room? William Henry, in his unfairly neglected book In Defense of Elitism (1994), speculates that the great change came “somewhere along Bill Clinton’s path to the White House.” By the mid 1990s, Henry observed, “The very word, used as a label, seems to be considered enough for today’s rhetoricians to dismiss their opponents as defeated beyond redemption.”

I should point out that, unlike me, William Henry was not a knuckle-dragging, right-wing fascist hyena. Indeed, he was not a hyena of any kind, but, on the contrary, was a life-long Democrat whose heroes included Hubert Humphrey, Martin Luther King Jr., etc., etc. Nevertheless, Henry understood that by enrolling “elitism” in the politically correct index prohibitorum verborum, one effectively condemns oneself to the cognitive dissonance of perpetual mendacity. The political philosopher Harvey Mansfield once spoke of “the self-evident half-truth that all men are created equal.” It is a politically expedient fiction as well as a judicial ideal. (It is curious, though, that anti-elitist partisans of equality draw the line at legal equality: when it comes to justice, what they want is not dispassionate evenhandedness but a certain predetermined outcome.) In the realm of talent and achievement, however, the ideology of equality is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. Henry dilated tartly on

the simple fact that some people are better than others–smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, thought we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.

True, too true, but hardly the sort of the your common or garden-variety Dean of Diversity would look kindly upon.

The point is that reality is elitist. Failure to acknowledge that might make you feel kinder, gentler, etc., but at the significant cost of living a lie.

The ineluctability of elitism is why I rankled at the description of Obama’s bitter-small-town-guns-and-God comment as elitist. It was smug; it was self-righteous; it was blinkered, bigoted, emotionally impoverished, and otherwise odious; it but it was not in any normal sense of the word “elitist.” I do not live in Pennsylvania. But I do live in a small(ish) town; I think the Second Amendment is a vital prophylactic against the untoward prerogatives of state power; and I’d sooner “cling” to religion than the hectoring, welfare-state, just-let-us-tell-you-how-to-live-your-life directives dispensed by Michelle and Barrack Obama. But what bothers me about such directives is not their elitism but their arrogance.

Indeed, for connoisseurs of political savvy, perhaps the most disturbing thing about Obama’s mini-diatribe was the contrast it revealed between the oleaginous, feel-your-pain evangelism of hope he has on an infinite playback loop and the disabused arrogance that crackles just beneath the burnished, campaign-trail mask.

The moral? Well, there is at this this one positive thing to come out of Obama’s statement: we now possess, much more precisely than before, some measure of the contempt in which Obama holds most Americans. Obama knows this, and he doesn’t like it. Which is why his replies to the widespread criticism of his remarks are instructive. “I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” he objected a day or two ago. But that was completely disingenuous. He said it plenty well. When Mr. Blotton, in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, asserts that Mr. Pickwick is a “humbug,” there would have been tears before bedtime had not a quick-thinking member of the Pickwick Club asked whether Mr. Blotton had used “humbug” in “its common sense.”

‘Mr. Blotton had no hesitation in saying that he had not–he had used the word in its Pickwickian sense. (Hear, hear.) He was bound to acknowledge that, personally, he entertained the highest regard and esteem for the honourable gentleman; he had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view. (Hear, hear.)

‘Mr. PICKWICK felt much gratified by the fair, candid, and full explanation of his honourable friend. He begged it to be at once understood, that his own observations had been merely intended to bear a Pickwickian construction. (Cheers.)’

And so it was with Obama’s bitter, small-town, gun-toting, God-fearing, xenophobic, unemployed isolationists. Really, he says now, he meant all that in a Pickwickian sense. What do you think? I think we all know exactly what he meant. He meant that he regarded most Americans as bitter, small-town, gun-toting, God-fearing, xenophobic, unemployed isolationists who needed help. That is bad enough. Even worse, however, is the disgusting pretense that he actually meant something more emollient. Most of us have gotten used to being treated with contempt by politicians. But Obama has upped the ante. It isn’t pleasant. But it is, at any rate, useful to know just how stupid he thinks we are. I for one will not forget it.

On Thursday, Andrew C. McCarthy and I hosted a conference on “Free Speech in An Age of Jihad: Libel Tourism, “Hate Speech,” and Political Freedom” at the Princeton Club in New York.

Sponsored jointly by The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and The New Criterion, the day-long conference brought together more than a dozen prominent commentators–and an audience of about 200–to discuss the ways in which “soft jihad” is undermining freedom of expression in the West.

We described the problem thus in the program for the conference:

Over the last several years, proponents of Islamic jihad have increasingly turned to the courts and government agencies in their effort to suppress criticism of radical Islam. The result has been a proliferation of libel suits and so-called “hate speech” actions that aim to curtail free speech and further the cause of radical Islam. Although generally initiated in countries less hospitable to free expression than the United States, these actions have had a profound “spill over” effect on American authors, journalists, and publishers. The aim of this conference is to provide an anatomy of these efforts to suppress free speech, to examine the way such actions aid and abet the spread of radical Islam, and to consider some possible responses, legal as well as journalistic, to the threats they pose.

Many people who have commented on the event have characterized it as a conference about “libel tourism.” It is a natural abbreviation–and one, moreover, that I abetted not only with the above description but also with “Terrorizing Publishing,” my op-ed that The New York Sun published on April 10, the day of the conference. But libel tourism, while certainly an important part of our discussion, describes only a part of the problem. In the first place, the practice of “venue shopping” in an effort to muzzle authors is only one tactic employed by Islamicists whose goal is not only to suppress criticism of radical Islam but also to propagate its spread and, indeed, its hegemony. Libel tourism is but one weapon in the multifarious armory of militant Islam.

There is, however, another, more interior, aspect of the problem of “free speech in the age of jihad” that has not yet received the attention it deserves. The unhappy truth is that the threat to civilization in the West comes not only from our enemies but also from within. This was a theme I touched upon in my introductory remarks at the conference and the Mark Steyn developed with his characteristic blend of humor and admonitory insight in his luncheon talk, “The Dimming of Liberty: Legal Jihad and the Criminalization of Resistance.”

Mark’s talk ranged widely, but its central message, he noted, was summed up by the historian Arnold Toynbee: Most civilizations, Toynbee wrote, die from suicide not murder. We in the West preen ourselves on our high standard of living, our freedoms, our pleasures. But what beliefs, what backbone, underwrite those material triumphs? Radical Islam is a fanatical, often a murderous, faith. The welfare-state liberalism of the West is less a faith than a perpetual grievance.

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek, hearkening back to Tocqueville’s analysis of “democratic despotism,” noted that “the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the in the character of a people.” The nature of that change was partly an enervation, partly an effeminization. One of the most penetrating meditations on the nature of that alteration Hayek discerned is James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West. Written in 1964, that book, like its author, is largely and unfairly forgotten today. Burnham’s was a first-rate political intelligence, and Suicide of the West is one of his most accomplished pieces of polemic. “The primary issue before Western civilization today, and before its member nations, is survival.”

Suicide of the West is very much a product of the Cold War. Many of the examples are dated. But Brunham’s message is more pertinenet than ever. In the subtitle to his book, Burnham promises “the definitive analysis of the pathology of liberalism.” At the center of that pathology is an awful failure of understanding which is also a failure of nerve, a failure of “the will to survive.” Liberalism, Burnham concludes, is “an ideology of suicide.” He admits that such a description may sound hyperbolic. “‘Suicide,’ it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and ‘bad.’” But it is part of the pathology that Burnham describes that such objections are “most often made most hotly by Westerners–think of those promulgating the gospel of multiculturalism in our universities–who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.”

When it came to facing down the mortal threat of Communism, Burnham noted that “just possibly we shall not have to die in large numbers to stop them: but we shall certainly have to be willing to die.” The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern liberalism has equipped us with an ethic too abstract and too empty to inspire real commitment. Modern liberalism, he wrote,

does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history. . . . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions–pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.

The Islamofascists have a fanatical belief that theirs is a holy mission, that incinerating infidels is their bounden duty. For them suicide is a gateway to paradise. For us suicide is just that: suicide. The question is whether we believe anything with sufficient vigor to jettison the torpor of our barren self-satisfaction. There are signs that the answer is Yes, but you won’t see them on CNN or read about them in The New York Times. One part of the purpose of “Free Speech in an Age of Jihad” was to describe the threat that radical Islam, in its more bureaucratic and legalistic avatars, poses to the West. Equally important was the effort to remind us that the threat to West civilization lies as much with our response–or rather, our lack of response. Western democratic society, I noted in my introdcutory remakrs, 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 the French philosopher 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 we answer them will determine the fate not just of Western journalism but Western civilization itself.

Yes, the world is agog! Harvard University, that 30-something-billion-dollar repository of political correctness, is sponsoring a conference on feminism that features a genuine diversity of opinion. Amazing, but apparently true. On April 10 and 11–tomorrow and Friday–Harvard will host a conference on “The Legacy and Future of Feminism”–”A Harvard First.” As an advance announcement put it, this is “The Conference that the Radcliffe Institute Didn’t Want to Host.” Among the participants will be Camille Paglia, Harvey Mansfield, Wendy Shalit, and Christina Hoff Sommers. Not only is the event is free and open to the public but–good news!–”Ladies receive and additional 50% off.” Hurry to Cambridge to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! For more information email pcg@gov.harvard.edu.