The Mess In The Academe

IN HER LATEST article marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher takes out after the fake Obama world tour. Even Andrea Mitchell, she writes, realizes that Obama is faking it, faking press conferences when no media was actually there.

"Let me say something about the message management. He didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call ’fake interviews,’ because they are not interviews from a journalist[.]"

The problem is that the candidate is all symbolism and impressions, not grounded and critical.

This ties in with some mournful comment about the halcyon days of the university—before the PC era. Paul Greenberg writes about the extraordinary professors he studies under at Columbia, Missouri.

The remarkable thing about those teachers was not their scholarship, though theirs was indeed remarkable, but the immense care and patience - the tenderness almost - that they took with us students.

Of course, these professors were almost all liberal. But they wanted their students to know both sides of the story. In The New Criterion historian Alan Kors writes elegiacally of the “sadnesss” of today’s university education.

The problem is that professors today are in a hurry. They have only four years to demolish the US-centric world-view of their students so they don’t have time for scholarship and development of a critical mind. They must just push their agenda, every day.

The problem with this sort of thing is that, in the end, you end up hurting yourself, not your students. And the folks powering Sen. Barack Obama’s fake world tour will find that out too, sooner or later.

Today’s generation of liberals won’t listen to conservatives, and won’t give them the opportunity to contribute to the academic conversation. That means that the mistakes of today’s generation of liberals will not be exposed until they have actually been enacted into law and into foreign policy.

We can see a preview of what is in store from the current energy flap. It’s all very well to confidently predict a new Flood a century from now as global warming engulfs the planet. These prophecies may be right or they may be wrong. But what about the impact of $4.50 per gallon gasoline on working Americans right now? Our liberal friends seem not to have thought about tha. Indeed they seem not to care.

Conservatives have been worrying about it for a while. In part, we care because liberals have taught us to care.

So when the current liberal generation comes face to face with reality, whether in 2009 or 2013, it ain’t gonna be pretty.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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