Correspondence
children know for a fact that they are not going to grow up. I'm going to make sure, bloody sure, they grow up and live to be 92." By this time small children were crying and asking to have their...
...The clear implication of this statement is a sort of solipsism...
...Now, as can readily be seen from Professor Nisbet's piece, liberalism in its environmentalist (or deathwish) stage professes to serve all humanity by preserving nature, but actually the only ones to benefit are the affluent few-who themselves are in the process of being progressively pared down, until even these are excluded in the name of "sacred nature...
...Caldicott's pants...
...The Enlightenment never took hold in England as it did in France, and the fairest flowers of English Deism must be sought among the likes of the third earl of Shaftesbury or Bolingbroke-not, after all, very hardy perennials...
...R.D...
...Mr...
...Whatever one's favorite epistemological theory, it has no bearing on the fact that when one hears or reads an intelligible sentence, one is fairly said to'know what the person who said or wrote it thought...
...C O R R E S P O N D E N C E...
...Francis and his followers...
...And in Olathe, Kansas inhabitants of the Johnson County Jail will no longer have to wash their own underwear, a penal practice that has been going on in those primitive parts from time out of mind, thanks to the local American Civil Liberties Union pests...
...Thomas Main Managing Editor The Public Interest New York, New York Deism and the English Having recently published a book on the holy and the daemonic in eighteenth-century literature, I really must take exception to Stephen Miller's remark, in "Religion and the Intellectual" [TAS, April 1983], that most English writers of that age were Deists...
...As a taxpayer, I am delighted to learn that someone has put some of my money to good use...
...Stephen B. Miles Falls City, Nebraska Robert Nisbet's review essay on environmentalism was excellent...
...Still Dr...
...In fact, only one major English writer was in any sense a DeistGibbon...
...There aren't Com munist babies," she roared...
...Had Franciscan pantheism prevailed utterly, the cost would have been nothing less than Western civilization...
...A baby is a baby is a baby...
...Spencer Sawyer, the former Little League coach from Sacramento who trained his players to knock off banks, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison and branded a "modern-day Fagin" by Sacramento's literary prosecuting officials...
...Francis, a thoroughly orthodox Catholic, of pantheism is to misunderstand him entirely or to empty the word of all meaning...
...Russell W. Martin Orange, California 5 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...
...The papal envoy to Britain, Archbishop Bruno B. Heim, suggested in a letter to the laity that British supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament are either adherents of Soviet rapacity, blinkered idealists, or idiots...
...Szasz's article-or anything else -is a waste of time...
...The movement so well started by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot has been subverted...
...Nisbet should be told that the Church does not canonize people who think a godlet lives under every rock...
...Readers of this journal will know where Burke stood, Whig though he was...
...At Poole harbor in southwest England Mr...
...He tells us that ". . . no human being can know what another thinks...
...To accuse St...
...I can know that I think but there is no ground for extending the compliment to anyone else...
...Even the psychiatrists he vilifies so remorselessly know better than that...
...Francis was a simpleton who spent his waking hours conversing with periwinkles, I suggest he begin his homework with G.K...
...This strikes me as a distinction without a difference...
...All liberalisms are elitist...
...Even her dupes were growing uneasy...
...Kenneth Clark and King Indris, Libya's last monarch...
...Szasz to suggest otherwise is an offense against common sense...
...Although Miller rightly excludes Samuel Johnson from his generalization, he has apparently succumbed to the cliches about the period popularized by Peter Gay and other "whig" critics...
...Karl Keating San Diego, California Why did Robert Nisbet have to spoil his brilliant article on "Modern Man and the Obsession" by citing Christianity as a parallel to environmentalism (and socialism...
...His argument itself showed that environmentalism is the most recent stage of that man-centered liberalism of which earlier stages were Renaissance/Enlightenment humanism, economic liberalism, and socialism-of all of which Christianity is the diametric opposite...
...He wrote: "The greatest heresy preached in the Middle Ages was that of St...
...Pope, a Roman Catholic all his life despite the discrimination then enforced, was greatly mortified when the natural theology of his Essay on Man was misinterpreted as Deistic...
...Tree Stumping Robert Nisbet's otherwise adequate look at environmentalist silliness ["Modern Man and the Obsession," TAS, May 1983] was marred by silliness of its own...
...Despite pious lip service to broader and broader swaths of humanity, their effect has been to concentrate power and control ever more narrowly...
...Eric Hoffer passed on, as did Dr...
...A longtime American Spectator reader of Christian sensibility offered to change Dr...
...And then it was the century of the great hymns: Watts, the Wesleys...
...Older kids were becoming indignant, and some of the museum's live exhibitions were bleating and stomping their hooves...
...Both Dryden and Swift despised and attacked Deism...
...Nisbet thinks St...
...For Mr...
...It was just kind of tacky," tacky having become a nonce term of great popularity particularly with liberal aesthetes...
...Szasz may try to rescue himself from this position by introducing a distinction between what people think and their "linguistic expressions": we can know what people write and say but not what they think...
...Christianity is on the other...
...By this time small children were crying and asking to have their pants changed...
...Many thanks for printing Nisbet's excellent article...
...I have no doubt that Marva Collins was right in taking that money, just as she is right in deploring such programs in general...
...Austen was too sensible...
...Finally The American Spectator may have readers in the Vatican...
...RET...
...Szasz's absurd expressions as...
...Stock Department of English University of Nebraska Lincoln, Nebraska Your Tax Dollars at Work Rita Kramer's article on Marva Collins ["Marva Collins and American Public Education," TAS, April 1983] was informative and refreshing, but I feel that on one point she gives too much to the enemy...
...Caldicott went on, "My drive is fear, fear for my kids," she hollered...
...Mike Spring set off intent on becoming the first paraplegic yachtsman to make a solo round-trip voyage to the Azores...
...She looked relieved...
...He was 93...
...It follows that reading Mr...
...Blake scorned the Deists as much as he did the jejunely pious, and Hume was too skeptical to be one...
...Edgar Bissantz Santa Barbara, California Who Thinks What...
...Defoe, Richardson, Smart, Cowper, were as far from Deism as a Christian can get, and Fielding was at most a latitudinarian...
...Finally she shut down...
...well...
...Well, good for her...
...Chesterton's biography of the saint...
...one still won't be able to know what he thinks...
...On page 11 the author states that "more damaging" were charges that Marva Collins, a foe of special education programs for minorities, accepted $69,000 from CETA in order to start her school...
...Boswell was too much the gadfly to be anything very long, but a Deist he never was...
...Many parents and some bystanders were eager to oblige...
...There aren't capitalist babies...
...The heroine of this blast for justice is Miss Claudia York, who crowed, "The underwear was not a constitutional question...
...Environmentalism and socialism are on one side, Professor Nisbet...
...If Mr...
...In that case it seems we are quite wrong to castigate the bombastic psychia trists, for their prose is no more thoughtless than anyone else's...
...Like everyone with a decent respect for good writing, I think that the opaque prose that is characteristic of psychiatrists-as well as other professionals-deserved the excoriation that Thomas S. Szasz gave it in your April issue ["Learned Psychotics...
...However, while we are on the subject, let us consider some of Mr...
...Those who have had dealings with such agencies as the California Coastal Commission, and attended meetings of people whose aim is to "control" the coastlines not only of the United States but of the entire world, can understand what is going on in the name of protecting the environment...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
