MARk FALCOFF: Lost Transcendence

...It was, in the words of Allan Bloom, “the closing of the American mind...

...Methodism, he Being There jokes, “you weren’t there...

...Think Jane Fonda sitting on an anti-aircraft battery in Hanoi, aiming at American war planes...

...In spite of its finely filigreed detail, it is also compellingly readable...

...Many who If you remember the sixties,” Robin Williams fantastic sent a rush through time and space as the Beatles sang “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds...

...It ends on a tragic note— the decision of the Europeans to go to war with one another, dragging their churches along with them...

...Even alphabets and grammars were suddenly infused with political content...

...Revolutionary festivals were convoked to replace the traditional Christian holidays...

...The revolution inaugurated modern gesture politics,” Burleigh cannot help observing in a piquant aside, “anticipating all those grim public housing projects named after Nelson Mandela or whatever the municipal commissars dream up in our own day as an alternative to doing much about educational failure or inner-city deprivation...

...impulses and pursue a path of moderate reform, hence the sensational murder of Alexander II in 1881, accomplished by throwing a bomb in his carriage...

...put it, conservatives will forever be disappointed...

...Tripping the light but also to impress upon those who had power that they were here today and gone tomorrow and responsible to those below and Him Above...

...In many ways, of course, Europe has never recovered from that event...

...No review can fully do justice to a narrative of this heft and detail...

...It follows on the heels of the recent publication of the second volume, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror, to be followed in due course the “internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational limits to politics,” as William F. Buckley Jr...

...Idealism fused with cynicism, fantasy begot fanaticism, liberty became license, and freedom morphed into a form of tyranny...

...The search was on, not just in France, but eventually in other European countries as well, for a substitute, which they found—or rather, thought they found—in worship of the state, and later, of the nation...

...9 4 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 suzanne Fields is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times...

...Earthly Powers is a narrative of the major events in European history bracketed by two crucial dates: 1789 and 1914...

...Only in Poland, due to unique circumstances related to the country’s partition between Germany and Russia, could ultra montanes and secular liberals make common cause...

...But the hatreds engendered by the first modern culture war poisoned French politics for a century or more...

...Although these events are remote in time, repeatedly throughout the reading one sees how they are being replicated in our own day, with the worship of nature (“the environment”) in place of the Deity, the crusade to banish traditional religion from the public square, or the urge to use educational institutions to indoctrinate children rather than to educate them...

...Discussion of theory in the ivory towers shut out the cries and whispers of Chinese counterparts, intellectuals who were being hunted down and rehabilitated to rescue China from “bourgeois pretensions...

...Readers can embrace or discard the various bits of policy wonkery...

...Here Burleigh takes straig l g n i s i r r t o , i s n e n m m o s r f u o he t o o ne it co c untry o in s this e s s ur n vey s u tha p t stand h y s t , turned on, you were someplace else...

...continues, “was never simply a creed designed to discipline an industrial workforce...

...In many ways, indeed, anticlericalism became a substitute for addressing the social problems produced by early industrialization or a kind of counterfeit revolutionism...

...aim at a whole legion of left-wing historians like TGreat Britain...

...9 2 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Lost Transcendence Reviewed by Mark Falcoff Mark Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington...

...Reviewed by suzanne Fields It didn’t take long for the antiwar movement to become a propaganda auxiliary of the Viet Cong...

...A careful reading of this book, in fact, brings home how much what many of us think we know is (unfortunately) due to tedious left-liberal historians like Simon Schama or sinister Marxist ones like Eric Hobsbawm...

...If you tuned in, you dropped out...

...Think Susan Sontag’s description of the United States as the source of evil in the world...

...Earthly Powers does exactly what a book of history should do—remind us that we are still living the backwash of events a hundred or more years ago...

...he had to be stopped before he neutered the country’s supposed revolutionary vocation...

...Douthat and Salam are right about the need to update the conservative agenda...

...In short, biggovernment conservatism usually fails not because Brownie didn’t do a heck of a job but because big government is poorly suited for conserving much beyond its own power...

...b o o K s I n R e v I e W The trouble with dismissing limited government as unpopular or politically impractical is that it becomes easy to forget why conservatives championed the idea in the first place...

...Radical students carried Mao’s “Little Red Book” as their bible for a Marxist revolution, as if they had never heard of the cruel, sadistic, and genocidal Cultural Revolution...

...The overproduction of university students in a society not yet sufficiently advanced to absorb them into a workaday world produced a culture of violence and assassination...

...Sweet dreams turned into nasty nightmares...

...b o o K s I n R e v I e W ‘culture wars’ fought between Christians, liberals and socialists, and how religious institutions, for better or worse, intervened or shaped political life...

...It is extremely difficult— much more difficult than the authors seem to imagine—to instill self-reliance through the welfare state, promote economic dynamism while minimizDouthat and Salam are right about the need to update the by Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, which will bring the narrative down to the present...

...a totalitarian state...

...As he points out in one tart passage, many of the conditions Marx and Engels depicted in British industrial towns— based in some cases on reading of factory inspectors’ reports—were out of date by the time their own studies appeared in print...

...It covers the same ground as many other volumes on the subject, but in far greater detail and in a very different way...

...they can even question how decisive white working-class voters will be in the next partisan realignment...

...But the single biggest failing of this ambitious, often impressive book is the authors’ casual assumption that it will be easy to use liberal means for conservative ends...

...Names of streets and months of the year were changed to give them ideological content...

...This is not, J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 9 3 b o o K s I n R e v I e W he emphasizes, to excuse the reactionary forces in the Russian court and church, merely to emphasize the dialectical relationship between them and their supposedly revolutionary adversaries...

...ll t T he rag f e, s e pread t n o , lished in France, the state took over the task not only of education but also of providing meaning and identity for its citizens...

...Better living through The Sixties Unplugged: A kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade By Gerard J. DeGroot (HarvarD university press, chemistry,” proclaimed a psy chedelic poster, parroting the old Du Pont advertising slogan...

...put it, our Dayton housewife will forever be disappointed...

...The was not merely to keep the lower orders quiescent… medium is the message, literally...

...It wasn’t out of cheapness, cruelty, or obsession with some abstract anti-government ideology...

...Earthly Powers does exactly what a book of history should do—remind us that we are still living the backwash of events a hundred or more years ago...

...And so will conservatives...

...Worse still, many Russian liberals who would never pick up a pistol or a bomb were nonetheless given to indulging and excusing what Burleigh calls “essentially criminal acts...

...Or, as Burleigh puts it differently, his book is about “the Earthly Powers is that the Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War By Michael Burleigh (Harper perennial, 529 pages, $16.95 paper) T trilogy on the plight of Western civilization i o g s ’ h g i u l e M o e m u l o v r fi he s t appearance f in i a c ha popu B lar r le edition o n of t n h i e g s a welcome event...

...In the section on the Vendée—the first popular counter-revolution of modern history, perhaps of all history—Burleigh reminds us just how brutal and bloodthirsty the revolutionary impulse was, so much so, in fact, that eventually even its leaders turned against Robespierre, who in these pages appears as a precursor of Leon Trotsky...

...If you acid your mind didn’t expand, it exploded...

...It was a decade of political protest, remembered mostly as marches for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, some peaceful and some violent, some mindful and others mostly mindless...

...This was the same czar who had already liberated the serfs and begun a system of public education and trials by jury...

...The seeds of peace and hope planted by naïve flower children bore poisonous berries of moral decay...

...If you dropped say they remember the sixties treat their history as if Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, arguing it were a personal hallucinogen with brightly colored that “the political function of religion [in Britain] abstract images punctuating a fog of pot smoke...

...Lack of enthusiasm was not acceptable, and outright secular apostasy, as Burleigh calls it, was often punished by the guillotine...

...After the advent of Napoleon, a new religious settlement was reached with the Vatican and the church—its properties confiscated and many of its bishops exiled or dethroned—became a department of the state...

...One of the most remarkable passages in the book deals with the French prime minister Émile Combes (1902, 1904–1911), who obsessively focused on the destruction of religious orders—closing thousands of schools and 11,000 hospitals (without, needless to say, thinking about how to replace the services they rendered...

...Citizenship now required active, not just passive, adherence...

...The central argument of collapse of the ancien régime in France from 1789 to 1793 constituted a kind of cultural earthquake in which men and women abandoned their traditional religious practices but not their need for transcendence...

...But without the “internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational limits to politics,” as William F. Buckley, Jr...

...And in fact, as he shows in great detail, during the Victorian era religious people tried to maintain a distinctive approach to social evils, “based on a combination of evangelism and social work, tampering laissez-faire liberalism with humanitarian intervention...

...But without his works on German history, in these books Burleigh emerges as a major public intellectual in his own country, the United Kingdom, as well as in the United States, where he has taught, and perhaps even in Spain, Italy, and Latin America, where this book has already appeared in vernacular editions...

...It was not enough to respect the new laws...

...Put another way, this is a more balanced, more profound, and more authoritative version of the past than most of us, even the best educated, probably carry around in our heads...

...508 pages, $29.95) But there are other ways of interpreting the decade of trash, trivia, and sometimes violent vulgarity...

...one had to embrace them wholeheartedly...

...Their first chapter should tell them otherwise: the New Deal was designed to promote the traditional family, but years later its programs undermined the black family in ways that cried out for welfare reform and imposed the tax on childrearing the authors now want to relieve...

...Once the church was disestab- T ps h i b t u o h i w r e a l u s n i p e h t e t e c o t r o t i h n i p m t t a s r fi e h t l a e t f a tion r on l, the Fre t nch e Rev t olutio s n, w y hich r w a as, in 186 en 4 nearly w ha e lf th t e dio ces s es o i e l p m a x r o s, u h t a n a l a t e t he best part of the book is clearly the secd h ise I ase i , no st w a es...

...Grand New Party is sure to start debates...

...This same anti- clerical (10 were put to trial, 43 sent into exile, and 16 were pre vented from taking up their posts...

...The sixties of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll...

...Indeed, the greatest fear of this new, subversive class was that the Czarist regime would suppress its reactionary The overproduction of university students in a society not yet sufficiently advanced to absorb them into a workaday world produced a culture of violence and assassination...

...Among subjects treated in a new and original way are Vatican politics and diplomacy, the Dreyfus case, Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Germany, the rise of Social Catholicism in France, Germany, and Austria and its often poisonous symbiosis with anti-Semitism...

...ing risk, and, most importantly, carve out a space for family and community life while giving decisionmaking power and vast amounts of money to centralized government bureaucracies...

...In Russia the unequal struggle between two simultaneous epochs—feudalism and modernity— gave birth to what Burleigh calls an alternative political morality...

...Previously known to a narrow circle of academics for conservative agenda...