When it comes to near-term Republican prospects, the punditocracy is divided. On the Left, it is doom, gloom, and gloat, as E. J. Dionne illustrates in a piece arguing that the G.O.P. is a “brand on the run.” On the right, it is doom, gloom, and gripe, as Peggy Noonan illustrates in a piece lamenting that Republicans are “busy dying.” “The brightest of them,” she writes, “see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.”

What should we think of all these distress calls? I confess I disapprove of them. In the first place, I do not think they’re at all justified. What Victor Davis Hanson called “the echo chamber” has taken over. One creditable–or at least listened to–pundit or politician opines in a way the media likes and, presto, a new bit of conventional “wisdom” is born–or at least reinforced. A mere opinion, often ill-informed, frequently at wide variance with the truth, is repeated often enough, and it suddenly acquires the carapace of general currency that, at a distance, can easily be mistaken for fact.

Hanson was writing about the conventional “wisdom” on the war in Iraq, but the echo chamber is at work on other issues as well. One conspicuous example, I believe, is the fate of conservatism. More than two decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan ruefully noted that Republicans had become “the party of ideas.” He was right about that, as recent American political history amply attests on issues from welfare and taxes to free markets and national security. But in the last couple of years, conservatives, especially conservatives in America and Europe, have seen their prospects fed into the echo chamber. Everywhere one looks, it seems, the fortunes of conservatism are–or are said to be–on the ebb. You can hardly open a newspaper or tune into a television news show without being warned (or, more often, without hearing celebratory shouts) that now, finally, at last, the forces of enlightenment and progress are once again on the ascendant, that conservative ideas and the people promulgating them are in rout. One saw this, for example, in the the aura of supposed inevitability–now conspicuously dissipated–that attended the campaign of Hillary Clinton a few months ago. People from every political persuasion simply took it for granted that the Presidency was hers for the asking. Why?

I have recently begun keeping a folder marked “Conservative Gloominess.” It is full of articles and animadversions by various hands: dire prognostications about who the next occupant of the White House will be, harrowing descriptions of disarray among conservatives, despairing portraits of U.S. or European society. What’s odd, or at least uncharacteristic about these bulletins from the abyss is not their substance–to be candid, I have written plenty of items that could justly be filed there–but their tone and what we might call their existential orientation. From time immemorial conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land. Nevertheless, by habit and disposition conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than–than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since they are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works. Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal. In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called–perhaps John Fonte’s marvellous coinage “transnational progressives” is best–they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor. The English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quota of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine. On the contrary. Conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a personal moral affront. Being realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings. This is why the miasmic gloominess emanating from many conservative circles today is so dispiriting. It goes against the grain of what it means to be conservative. It is dampening, and I for one hope it will prove to be a quickly passing phenomenon. Among other things, this recent access of personal gloominess makes the practice of professional gloominess–the robust deployment of satire, ridicule, and so on–much more difficult and less satisfying.

This brings me to the issue of truth. Conservatives are realists. They like to call things by their proper names. Like Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, they call a spade a spade, unless it is explicitly outlawed, just as they prefer to call “affirmative action” “discrimination according to race or sex,” taxation “government-mandated income redistribution,” and “Islamophobia” a piece of Orwellian Newspeak foisted upon an unsuspecting public by irresponsible “multiculturalists” colluding more or less openly with Islamofascists.

Towards the end of his thoughtful new book Comeback: Conservatism that Can Win Again, David Frum gently takes issue with Russell Kirk’s invocation of “the permanent things.” “How few of those there really are!” Frum writes. “The fact of change is the great fact of human life,” he says, pleading with conservatives to “adapt” to change and retake the intellectual and political initiative. Some such rhetoric might be required on the hustings. But I confess to having mixed feelings about that exhortation, if for no other reason than that I believe change to be not the but a great fact of human life. An equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one “adapts” more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, “it is necessary not to change.”

I recognize that “change,” like its conceptual cousin “innovation,” is one of the great watchwords of the modern age. But William F. Buckley Jr. was on to something important when he wrote, in the inaugural issue of
National Review in November 1955, that a large part of the magazine’s mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” It’s rare that you hear someone quote that famous line without a smile, the smile meaning “he wasn’t against change, innovation, etc., etc.” But I believe Mr. Buckley was in earnest. It was one of the things that made National Review unzeitgem„sse, “untimely” in the highest sense of the word. The
Review, Mr. Buckley wrote, “is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and
The New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in

The Australian philosopher David Stove saw deeply into this aspect of the metabolism of conservatism. In “Why You Should Be a Conservative,” which deserves to be better known than it is, he rehearses the familiar scenario:

A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. You enable everyone to travel, and one result is, that there is nowhere left worth travelling to. And so on.

This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a “reform” proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, “reform.”

Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that “reform” so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed. The great Victorian Matthew Arnold was no enemy of reform. But he understood that “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith had left culture dangerously exposed and unprotected. In cultures of the past, Arnold thought, the invigorating “remnant” of those willing and able to energize culture was often too small to succeed. As societies grew, so did the forces of anarchy that threatened them–but so did that enabling remnant. Arnold believed modern societies possessed within themselves a “saving remnant” large and vital enough to become “an actual” power that could stem the tide of anarchy. I hope that he was right.

Instapundit points to Ann Althouse who, investigating The New York Times on the West Virginia primary, comes to this melancholy conclusion.

“White. White. White. Race. Race. Race. Oh, you Democrats. You’ve really made a nice place for yourselves.”

That about sums it up. Who was it who pointed out that in the 19th century the Democrats were the party of slavery, in the 20th century they were the party of segregation, and in the 21st century they are the party of neo-segregation (aka, racial quotas, spurious multiculturalism, and the mendacious imperatives of political correctness)? I don’t recall, but whoever it was, he was correct. The interesting rhetorical issue is why many people (which might, now that I think of it, mean just “many democrats,” i.e., professors, media types, etc.) believe that Republicans, who champion freedom and individual responsibility, are as a party more racist than Democrats. A question that deserves more study.

The artist Robert Rauschenberg died on Monday, age 82, at his home in Florida. The Hosannas were loud and predictable. Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times, spoke for the terminally infatuated when he praised Rauschenberg as an artist who “time and again reshaped art in the 20th century,” whose work “gave new meaning to sculpture,” and whose promiscuous dabblings “defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style.” (Unlike, for example, Leonardo da Vinci, who painted, sculpted, designed buildings, composed music, did serious mathematical, engineering, and scientific work.)

Kimmelman and his fellow cheer leaders are following over themselves to praise Ruaschenberg’s inventiveness and creativity. But what, really, does his art add up to? I went to a huge retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work in New York in the late 1990s. You started at the Guggenheim Museum at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street, where hundreds of objects made or at least signed by Rauschenberg were arranged in roughly chronological order, from the beginning of Rauschenberg’s career in the early 1950s up to about fifteen minutes before the exhibition open. You then trekked downtown to the Guggenheim’s SoHo old outpost at Broadway and Prince Street, where Rauschenberg’s technology-based and multimedia works were on view, along with more paintings, sculptures, collages, and “combines” from the previous year or two. Then one traveled across town to Spring and Hudson Streets, where the Guggenheim Museum at Ace Gallery was showing The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, a work in progress that began in 1981 and, when I saw it, consisted of 189 parts that consumed some 1000 feet of wall and floor space.

After making these rounds, a friend and I wearily decanted ourselves into a taxi and headed back uptown. We were stopped at a traffic light when a car pulled up beside us and an Airedale in the backseat began barking furiously through a half-opened window. When I turned to look at the dog, he suddenly stopped barking, yawned broadly, and lay down. “He doesn’t know whether to bark or yawn,” my friend observed. Which more or less sums up my reaction to that biggest-ever travelling road show of works by Robert Rauschenberg.

There are worse things celebrated as great art today: things, anyway, that are more aggressively repellent. But I cannot remember an exhibition that left such a melancholy aftertaste. A press release claimed that, in his nearly fifty-year career, “Robert Rauschenberg has redefined the art of our time.” (Michael Kimmelman must have read that press release.) There is, alas, a sense in which this is true. Not that there is anything original or innovative about Rauschenberg’s art. On the contrary, his work is primarily a highly commercial version of what Marcel Duchamp was doing in the Teens and Twenties with his “ready-mades.” In essence, it is a window-dresser’s version of Dada: Dada (slightly) prettified and turned into a formula–Dada, in short, for the masses.

Like Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg’s chief genius has been for celebrity. His works are props in a gigantic publicity campaign whose purpose is to foster a species of brand-name recognition. In Rauschenberg’s case, the brand in question is generic: it’s art-in-general. What we are meant to admire is not the aesthetic achievement of Rauschenberg’s work–that, indeed, is a question that scarcely arises–but rather the fact that it somehow managed to achieve the status of art in the first place. Like Dr. Johnson’s dog prancing on its hind legs, it’s not how well it performs but the fact that it performs that way at all that inspires wonder.

Writing in 1967, the American critic Clement Greenberg noted that many contemporary artists were exploiting “the shrinking of the area in which things can now safely be non-art.” Rauschenberg, whom Greenberg described as a “proto-Pop” artist, again and again proved himself extraordinarily adroit at this game, ready at a moment’s notice with an old bathtub, a crumpled cardboard box, a wooden frame filled with dirt and mold, or simply a blank canvas to offer an eager art market. All of which is to say that by the time Rauschenberg came on the scene the area that could “safely be non-art” had already been collapsed nearly to zero. Rauschenberg’s talent–again like Warhol’s (and like that of his early collaborator Jasper Johns)–was to look back on this collapse with a knowing, eminently packageable smirk.

Much of the smirk, especially in Rauschenberg’s early work, was directed at the art of his older contemporaries. This is part of what made Rauschenberg such a hit among intellectuals, for whom the spectacle of artistic self-reference is irresistible. It reminds them, just barely, of having discovered something. Rauschenberg offers them a battered wooden box into which he has hammered a bunch of rusty nails and tossed a few pebbles: they think “Joseph Cornell, sort of,” and are happy.

You can tell a lot about Rauschenberg’s work simply from its list of ingredients. Consider Monogram (1955-59), which the Moderna Museet in Stockholm actually paid good money to acquire. This typical “Combine,” greatly admired by Kimmelman, consists of oil paint, paper, fabric, printed paper, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe heel, and tennis ballon canvas, with oil paint on an Angora goat (stuffed) wearing an automobile tire and standing on a wooden platform mounted on four casters. It’s almost enough to make one sympathize with the animal-rights fruitcakes. (It certainly makes one sympathize with the museum conservators charged with “preserving” this stuff.)

There’s a character in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend known as “the golden dustman,” a chap who made his fortune trawling through garbage heaps. Rauschenberg is a kind of golden dustman. At least, an exhibition of his work reminds one of nothing so much as a visit to a gigantic dustbin or junk yard, and one that magically coins vast sums of money. It will be objected that there is nothing unusual about this: that many, maybe most, of the more glamorous precincts of the contemporary art world are every bit as trashy as those inhabited by Robert Rauschenberg. I readily concede the point. But there is something special about Rauschenberg. It has partly to do with longevity–Rauschenberg was around the art world for a very long time–partly with his facileness. What Rauschenberg produced was undoubtedly junk, but he managed to produce a mighty impressive mound of it and he did so with buoyant insouciance.

Over the years, Rauschenberg won just about every award and honor a cynical art world and gullible public can confer. In 1976, he made the cover of Time magazine, which presented a picture of the beaming artist, in open shirt and sunglasses, with the legend “The Joy of Art.” What it should have said was “The Joy of Artist.” That at least would have been credible.

It’s was the combination of celebration and unremitting trashiness that finally made that retrospective of Rauschenberg’s art unbearably depressing. If Robert Rauschenberg can be said to have “redefined the art of our time,” it is because of the steady pressure that the growing embrace and exaltation of his work has exerted on contemporary taste. As one walked along the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s expanding spiral at the Guggenheim, one followed the course of Rauschenberg’s career from 1949 until the late 1990s. Along the way, there was no aspect of contemporary artistic culture that is not mocked, trivialized, or turned into some sort of joke. The only exceptions were the ghostly exposed blueprints that Rauschenberg did in 1950 in collaboration with his then wife, the artist Susan Weil. These were the only two works, out of several hundred on view, that communicated any genuine aesthetic emotion. But these works were said to have been Susan Weil’s idea, and they served chiefly to highlight the poverty of everything that surrounded them.

Here’s a shocking admission: I haven’t given a moment’s thought to the carnage in Myanmar (or “Burma,” as I continue to call that far-off place). Should I berate myself for this cold-heartedness? After all, everywhere you turn you find people loudly declaring their solidarity with the unfortunate victims of the cyclone there. The death toll mounts day by day: 10,000, 50,000–I even saw a headline that speculated 1,000,000 might die if nothing were done.

The numbers, of course, are pure fabrications, so let me speculate that 10,000,000 will die unless you wring your hands and loudly tell the world how much you care–before, of course, you sit down for dinner tonight with the wife and kids and talk about your plans for the weekend.

I’ve always found such abstract benevolence a bit sick-making. It’s what Dickens, in Bleak House, described as “telescopic philanthropy,” the fervent pretense of concern for others, the farther away and less connected with you, the more fervent–and more empty, of course. John Stuart Mill specialized in a particularly unctuous form of this deformation. In Utilitarianism, Mill argued that “as between his own happiness and that of others, justice requires [everyone] to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.” Do you believe that? No, I don’t either. As Mill’s great critic, James Fitzjames Stephen noted in his classic polemic Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (if you haven’t read it, you should), if Mill was right about being “strictly impartial” about one’s own happiness and that of others, then “I can only say that nearly the whole of nearly every human creature is one continued course of injustice, for nearly everyone passes his life in providing the means of happiness for himself and those who are closely connected with him, leaving others all but entirely out of account.”

Yes, but isn’t this a bad thing? Not at all. Such selfishness–if “selfishness” is the correct word–is not only proper, it actually conduces to more happiness than the opposite–the pretense of universal benevolence. Stephen explains:

The man who works from himself outwards, whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things much more happiness to others . . . than a moral Don Quixote who is always liable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors. On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love of the human race–that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind–is an unaccountable person . . . who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular. The real truth is that the human race is so big, so various, so little known, that no one can really love it.

The moral? It is easy but fundamentally hypocritical to pretend to care about 10,000 (or 50,000 or 1,000,000) strangers. It is harder, and also more beneficial to the world, to care about oneself and one’s family and friends.

In an essay in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio offered a useful corrective to the obsession with 1968 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of that fateful year. It really was fateful, but Donadio is right to point out that much that we associate with “the Sixties” really had its origin in the 1950s. She focuses on 1958–an important year, no doubt, though one could make a case for other years as well (1956, for example, saw the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s preposterous, though immensely influential, poem Howl). “Fifty years ago,” she writes, “Eisenhower was in the White House, the country was in a recession and the American intellectual scene was crackling with energy.” Quite right, though not often acknowledged by those partisans of the Sixties whose paeans to the Purple Decade always seem to begin by running down the 1950s as a culturally and intellectually era distinguished chiefly by sexual repression, Joseph McCarthy, and an unhealthy obsession with Communism. The list Donadio offers is not, to my mind, entirely edifying, but it certainly shows that the 1950s were alive and kicking. Nineteen Fifty-eight, she notes,

the advent of everything from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” to “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, that year’s Nobel laureate in literature; the first American edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society”; Philip Roth’s story “Goodbye, Columbus”; and Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” — not to mention Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” Robert Frank captured the uncertain tenor of the time in his 1958 photography book, “The Americans,” as did Jasper Johns in his 1958 painting “Three Flags,” in which he superimposed three American flags, each smaller than the next, transforming the familiar into the abstract, the iconic into the unsettled.

The good, the bad, and the malevolent, but a far cry from the usual portrait of the 1950s as a braindead wasteland. You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how “creative,” “idealistic,” and “loving” it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the “herd of independent minds.” Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical clichés; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for “love” was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.

What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast, “were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.”

Donadio is chiefly interested in reminding us of the febrile cultural animation of the late Fifties. What she doesn’t say is, but what we can no see clearly with the wisdom of hindsight, is that the ideas of the Beats contained in ovo nearly all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the na‹ve political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.

Indeed, the chief difference between the Beat Generation and the Sixties was the ambient cultural climate: when the Beats first emerged, in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the poisonous antinomianism the Beats advocated. But by the time the Sixties established themselves, virtually all resistance had been broken down. It was then that the message of the Beats gained mass appeal. Reaction to the Vietnam War probably did more than anything else to enfranchise their antinomianism, though the introduction of the birth-control pill certainly did a great deal to further the cause of the sexual revolution, a prime item on the agenda of the Beats. In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.

In a word, the establishment of the Beat “church” was significant as a chapter in the moral and cultural degradation of our society. Regarded as a literary phenomenon, however, what the Beats produced exists chiefly as a kind of artistic antimatter. It would not be quite right to say that its value is nil, for that might imply an innocuous neutrality. What the Beats have bequeathed us is actively bad, a corrupting as well as a corrupt phenomenon. To borrow an image from the Australian philosopher David Stove, the Beats created a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.”

I doubt that Donadio would agree with this assessment, but her essay is a salutary reminder 1) that the Sixties did not burst full grown from the head of Timothy Leary in 1968 and 2) the the 1950s was in fact period of great intellectual and cultural ferment.

Earlier today, I reported on The New York Times’s cheerful story about “mad pride,” the effort by various lunatics (I use the term in the way Mr. Blotton used “humbug,” in its Pickwickian sense) to reverse the unfair stigmatizing of insanity by “embracing their madness,” so to speak. Just as certain homosexuals now proudly employ the word “queer”–once a term of disapprobation–to describe themselves, so some of the hallucinatorily-inclined want to dust off and revel in (not to say “rave about”) words like “mad.”

It is worth noting not only how widespread these efforts at semantic rehabilitation are in the Times and other organs of political-social orthodoxy, but also how uni-directional they are. The “fashion and style” story about Mad Pride exhibits one slightly preposterous aspect of the phenomenon. A more sinister aspect is on view in the Times’s effort to normalize the pathology of radical Islam. As Robert Spencer points out in an excellent post at JihadWatch today, the Times was up to its old trick of defining deviancy down in its recent flattering profile of Ali Ardekani by Neil MacFarquhar. MacFarquhar compares Ardekani to Bill Cosby, claiming he is an exemplary “moderate” who provides a good role model for Muslim youths. Quoth MacFarquhar, “Mr. Ardekani is among the most visible of a new wave of young American Muslim performers and filmmakers trying to change the public face of their religion. His most popular video posting — “Who Hijacked Islam?” — has garnered more than 350,000 hits on YouTube since July 2006. . . . The role model is Bill Cosby, who young Muslim filmmakers believe changed the perception of African-Americans by depicting them as ordinary.”

How sweet! Let’s get out the cardigan and slippers and have a cup of hot chocolate before turning it.

Unfortunately, as Spencer points out, Ardekani is an Islamic supremacist whose songs glorify jihad and Islamic triumphalism. Spencer quotes some lyrics from Ardekani’s now-disbanded rap group “Soldiers of Allah“:

Even if all the kafirs got together…
They still couldn’t stop this Ummah!
We love Islam More than we love life

No more kufur system to be run
All of these belong to one land
Part of once mighty Islamic span
More than 52 nations we fall
One nation strong we stand tall
Waiting for the Ummah’s call
Once again and for all
Reestablish Islam to rule all

over a billion
But oh so weak
We need to rise up
And get back on our feet
We’ve been fooled too long
This what happens
When we let kafirs lead

et very much cetera.

As Spencer notes, you’ll find none of this in MacFarquhar’s valentine. Like Tariq Ramadan, Ardekani seems to have be anointed a “moderate,” notwithstanding his very un-moderate sentiments. Now that I think of it, I can see why the Times should be so keen to run flattering pieces of people embracing their madness. Their own coverage is increasingly insane: why not make endeavor to make a virtue out of a vice and pretend that insanity is something to be proud of.

What makes a typical New York Times story so awful? Well might you ask. Connoisseurs of cant have devoted many hours to the question. Some have proposed detailed criteria, noting that a peculiar union of smugness and political correctness accompanies most characteristic specimens of the genre. Other critics point out that such typologies tend to be hopelessly ad hoc, that the Times is awful in so many ways simultaneously that to focus on smugness and political correctness is to ignore the contributions of many other aspects of journalistic and rhetorical failure, not to mention intellectual shallowness and blatant political animus. The best we can do, these critics say, is to acknowledge, as St. Augustine did with respect to the mystery of time (or Justice Potter Stewart did with respect to pornography), that we “know it when we see it” but are–such are the limitations of human intelligence (to say nothing of the human stomach)–utterly unable to provide anything like an accurate and comprehensive definition of the phenomenon.

Still, like a coleopterologist in the field, we can all do our little bit towards building up a library of examples in the hope that some future social Linnaeus will appear among us to impart system and order to these apparently miscellaneous scraps of pathology.

It is in that humble spirit that I direct my readers’ attention to “‘Mad Pride’ Fights a Stigma,” a story in the “Fashion and Style” section today. Allow me to begin by noting how appropriate it is that a story about reclaiming pride in insanity should appear in a section devoted to “Fashion and Style.” Some enterprising investigators will want ponder the metastasis of fashion and style in elite liberal culture. They will want to pay particular attention to the way fashion and a certain species of left-wing politics have joined forces, or perhaps “inter-married” would be a more accurate description. Here I will only point out the relevance of an earlier study by the social pathologist Tom Wolfe, whose work among the natives resulted in an important monograph on the phenomenon of Radical Chic, a fertile concept whose emanations and penumbrae have yet to be fully catalogued.

But that is work for another day. For now, let me simply recommend to your attention the Times’s latest entry in (as Nietzsche put it) the Transvaluation of All Values. My executive summary: once upon a time, in the bad old days, being mad was “stigmatized” by small-minded cretins, er, I mean small-minded bigots. Back then, it was critical The Elect not acknowledge that someone who seemed, you know, STARK RAVING BONKERS was mad or insane. Those are prejudicial terms, and we members of The Elect have read Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing and we know that sanity is a social construction. Despite George W. Bush, we members of The Elect have been eagerly spreading enlightenment and now it is time for this traditional victim group to reclaim its heritage and take pride in its “differently-abled” mentality. In short: We’re mad. We’re glad. Get used to it.

Lest that precis seem too schematic, let me quote from the story by the Times reporter Gabrielle Glaser:

Just as gay-rights activists reclaimed the word queer as a badge of honor rather than a slur, these advocates proudly call themselves mad; they say their conditions do not preclude them from productive lives.

Mad pride events, organized by loosely connected groups in at least seven countries including Australia, South Africa and the United States, draw thousands of participants, said David W. Oaks, the director of MindFreedom International, a nonprofit group in Eugene, Ore., that tracks the events and says it has 10,000 members.

Recent mad pride activities include a Mad Pride Cabaret in Vancouver, British Columbia; a Mad Pride March in Accra, Ghana; and a Bonkersfest in London that drew 3,000 participants. (A follow-up Bonkersfest is planned next month at the site of the original Bedlam asylum.)

Of course, every revolution spawns factions and splinter groups. And so it is no surprise that what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” should taint the pride and happiness of these newly enfranchised lunatics, if I may employ another traditional epithet that is in need of semantic rehabilitation.

Members of the mad pride movement do not always agree on their aims and intentions. For some, the objective is to continue the destigmatization of mental illness. A vocal, controversial wing rejects the need to treat mental afflictions with psychotropic drugs and seeks alternatives to the shifting, often inconsistent care offered by the medical establishment.

Oh, the mad, bad “medical establishment.” It not only keeps harping on the difference between sanity and insanity but also insists on “privileging” one over the other! How judgmental. How prejudiced. How unlike The New York Times.

Yesterday, Victor Davis Hanson, reflecting on Obama’s “new messianic rules of engagement,” posted a brief observation on “the advantages of Sainthood.”

he talks about supposedly illiberal Pennsylvanians as a racial group or quips “typical white person”, associates with the racist Wright, and counts on a solid base that votes 90 percent along racial lines, and you are a racist for being disturbed by that Manichaeism. He talks of hope/change, new politics, unity, and bipartisanship and you are cynical and hateful for not buying it and instead worrying that he has a serial propensity for distortion . . . and invective. . . . The immediate advantage is that the nonbeliever is always ridiculed for his devilish skepticism . . .

Hanson went on to note that this immediate advantage–the presumption on the part of the orthodox that dissent is tantamount to heresy–involves an “eventual downside for Obama,” namely that “the loftier the prophet, the more transparent his all-too-human transgressions.”

We will, in the weeks to come, be hearing a lot about Obama’s human, all-to-human failings. George Orwell was right when, in an essay on Gandhi, he remarked that “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” Obama has so far escaped that judgment. But his prefabricated canonization is betraying signs of decomposition. More and more, we’re seeing variations on the theme of “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Obama and Bill Ayres. Obama and Rev. Wright. Obama and Rashid Khalidi. What does the company he keeps tell us about the man who keeps it? The real issue, of course, but the one thing that the Obama canonization committee do everything in its power to obfuscate about, is Obama’s voting record. It is often pointed out by his opponents that Obama is by far most left-wing candidate ever to be a serious contender for the presidency. Everyone knows, though not everyone will say, what that means. It means, on the plus side, many opportunities for sanctimonious grandstanding. Everyone enjoys a bit of that. But there would be disadvantages, too. Americans would be more heavily taxed, i.e., they would be poorer. They would be less well protected against external threats, including the threat of terrorism. They would find the government intruding into, and controlling, more and more aspects of daily life. Secular sainthood has its attractions. It’s only when it collides with reality that its liabilities become apparent.

From Madatoms (via Instapundit). A story whose title says it all: “Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party.”

It’s 2:31 AM. The Democratic Party is sleeping peacefully when it hears its phone buzz on the night stand. It rolls over and sees “Hillary” on the caller ID. It pauses briefly, considering pushing “END” . . .

Parody? or Documentary?

Once upon a time, Scientific American was a great way for humanists–a fancy name for the scientifically illiterate–to keep up with what was happening in the world of science. The magazine was wide-ranging, deep enough to be respectable but written for the interested layman. Above all it everywhere displayed a contagious curiosity about the natural world. In recent years, alas, it has been more and more infected by the virus of political correctness. The April 2008 issue contains a particularly silly article that illustrates the problem. It’s called “Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain” (h/t the always excellent Arts & Letters Daily). The author, Siri Carpenter, accurately notes that all of us “unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.” But instead of asking what that tells us about the reality of human nature–and by extension, what it tells us about the reality of the world that human nature is responding to–Carpenter launches into an extended liberal-guilt dance about the persistence of “implicit bias.” “Deep within our subconscious,” a bold-faced description of the article reads, “all of us harbor biases that we consciously abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them.”

But what if we didn’t act on them? Carpenter begins this threnody by quoting Jesse Jackson’s famous–or infamous, depending on the depth of one’s commitment to liberal orthodoxy–admission that when he walks down the street and hears footsteps behind him, he is relieved when he looks around and sees somebody white. Carpenter is aghast at the prejudice Jackson’s comment betrays. She laments “a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape,” namely that “ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.”

Carpenter is horrified that even Jesse Jackson–Jesse Jackson!–should be tainted by the sin of prejudice. But let’s step back a moment and examine the word “prejudice.” At least since John Stuart Mill, we have been encouraged to associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry. How many teachers, in primary and secondary schools as well as colleges, regard it their first duty to relieve their students of “prejudice.” But prejudice does not have to mean bigotry or ignorance. It can also mean the repository of moral, social, and intellectual wisdom represented by custom, habit, and tradition.

This was something that Edmund Burke, for example, saw clearly. “Prejudice,” Burke wrote, “renders a man’s virtue his habit. . . . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.” In seeking to relieve us of prejudice, well-meaning liberals also seek to relieve us of those unspoken commitments that families and churches have painstakingly sought to instill. That indeed is one reason parents are right to be suspicious of teachers who promise to “emancipate” their students from prejudice. What that often means in practice is emancipating them from the moral and religious precepts they have been brought up on. It is a form of social engineering brought into the classroom and carried out by the same wretched people who think that “it takes a village” to educate our children.

Let us grant that there are such things as stultifying homogeneity and ignorant bigotry. That is not at issue. The point is that there is also such a thing as groundless diversity which just might pose a much more serious threat to our society today than prejudice. In order to be meaningful, diversity must rest on a common moral, social, and intellectual culture. Without that common ground, diversity rapidly degenerates into mere tribalism. Dialogue requires not only diversity but also devotion to shared principles.

There are basically two problems with the sort of programmatic “non-biased” approach to the world that Siri Carpenter extols. One is that it systematically discounts the advantages of that “just prejudice” Burke commends to our attention. The second, and in some ways more serious, problem is its implicit utopianism. I note from her personal web page that Carpenter advertizes the fact that she contributes “5 percent or more of my profits to various non-profit, philanthropic organizations.” It’s nice that she makes the contributions. I trust that I am not alone in finding the public declaration slightly emetic. Carpenter wishes the world were a certain way. Alas, the world refuses to cooperate. What if Jesse Jackson’s reaction was rational, i.e., a reasonable inference from the available evidence? What then?