Editorial II
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial II When Certitudes turn to Platitudes Last month my distinguished colleague, Mr. Nathan, edified us with one of his typically dispassionate and measured editorials, this time on the...
...But then he got so conceited about his music that I made him stop the lessons, but he still sang special solos in church . . . ." However not everyone's son sang in church and the son of a prairie preacher, George S. McGovern, said on 18 January that he would run for the presidency in a campaign resting on ". . . candor and reason...
...In the scholarly organizations, New Left scholarship deliberately takes issue with Liberal certitudes...
...The fate of Cambodia and Laos remained in the balance as it was reported after a six day news blackout in the United States that allied troops were sweeping through northwest South Vietnam along the Laotian border...
...And what of Liberalism, the ideology that so often saw itself the vanquisher of these defunct visions...
...Every value is relative, and for some reason, nothing seems worth achieving-or defending...
...For in his insistence to give all sides a fair shake, I fear my gentle associate neglected one of the Report's most palpable deficiencies-its disregard for the aphorism that "ideas have consequences "--especially at the university...
...Now that Liberalism has come under the assault of its own children, the intellectuals do not possess the sinew to defend it...
...Liberalism, like most of the other traditions of western civilization, no longer enjoys the intellectuals' confidence...
...Nathan, edified us with one of his typically dispassionate and measured editorials, this time on the Scranton Report issued by the President's Commission on Campus Unrest...
...Now, we all know that the American university has, for many years, been the sanctified preserve of Liberalism...
...But why is Liberalism now being mugged by its ideological progeny...
...But, I do doubt that a democratic society can endure with neither a consensus on its values nor an intellectual defense of those values...
...Death also visited the home of Mrs...
...Liberalism too has felt the heat (often self-generated by its own eschatological indifference or confusion...
...Manson and three female colleagues on twenty-seven counts of murder and conspiracy for the deaths of Sharon Tate and six of her party-going friends...
...It is a rare Liberal who can even discuss a society's values without seeing all sorts of flashing red lights and caution signs...
...And why are Liberals so reluctant to defend their ideas...
...The nationalism of the past now portends cataclysms too horrible to behold...
...With the universities throbbing from unrest, I should have thought the Scranton Report would have more meticulously investigated the ideas floating about universities and the devotion professors have for those ideas...
...I have neither the expertise nor the inclination to reflect on all the consequences that the Liberalism of university intellectuals has had on students, specifically enraged students...
...By midcentury it was threadbare, and even "such journals as Dissent have lost their luster today...
...Udall resides in Virginia...
...Efforts of eight firemen to get her into a pickup truck and to a hospital proved futile...
...Television lost an estimated $220 million as the FCC's ban on cigarette advertising went into effect, and Mrs...
...Well, of course, one purely unexpected reason is that the Liberal professors have not really attended too closely to their own disciples...
...Liberalism has weathered much unjustified execration from the radicals in recent years...
...Gladis Hardman of Pacific Grove, California when the 580 pound woman laid down for a nap and crushed herself...
...As Richard Weaver reminded us ideas have consequences as do the state of those ideas...
...It is a humane system of thought which attempts to expand individual opportunity by way of governmental ministrations...
...Udall convinced the plaintiff to settle the matter out of court.settle the matter out of court...
...During the post-war period, as Edward Shils has written in The Sewanee Review: The ideals of the European Enlightenment have quietly reasserted their validity without arousing intellectuals to passion on their behalf...
...At the university where people are supposed to know such things, professors reveal their knowledge only "soberly, circumspectly, and with moderation...
...This wasn't good for her and the fat around her chest crushed her to death," explained the doctor...
...It was from the ideals of bourgeois liberalism that they had turned away in the great long wave of political enthusiasm which the Russian Revolution of 1917 had raised to a flood...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Why have Liberalism's ideas come upon such awful consequences...
...In Weber's day handicraftsmen and small enterprisers were in decline...
...The characteristic Liberal professor is a devotee of moral relativism, and if one is a The McGill Manufacturing Company Supports The Alternative Approach to a Better America Valparaiso, Indiana relativist, one does not affirmatively profess Beethoven grander than the Jefferson Airplane or Elio superior to Jerry Rubin...
...This skepticism over values has enervated most of our Liberal intellectuals...
...Unction...
...As for religion, the last western religion possessed of a world vision-Roman Catholicism-has lost its drive and loosed its hold on the hearts of its followers...
...But this has more to do with the distortion of ideas than with transmission of ideas...
...Contrary to incontinent leftists, Liberalism is not the rhetorical armor of Imperial America...
...I want the whole story told in court so people can see what can happen to an absent-minded person...
...Their New Politics will either take command of the Democratic Party or they will split from that party and destroy it...
...It survives in a $6.88 billion transportation bill good until March, 1971...
...Later it was reported that Mr...
...Senator Mansfield complained that his only source of news had been the Russian press which surprised many observers and was adjudged most unfortunate...
...Finally, tragedy struck the family of Stewart L. Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, when Mr...
...Audrey Lewis of London, England electrocuted herself on a "home-made slim machine" invented by her mechanic husband...
...Udall said after being booked, fingerprinted, and mugged, "It's just incredible to me that this sort of thing can happen to an American (Mr...
...Those students who seasonally gather to "unrest" the university have, in fact, completely rejected Liberalism...
...As Mr...
...In this palmy era of technicians and engineers, who needs literature professors, especially literature professors who do not feel Chaucer calculably more relevant than LeRoi Jones...
...This easy-going infidelity-even more than Liberalism's inanities-has made massive student unrest inevitable...
...Now that they have come back to these ideals, they have come back soberly, circumspectly, and with moderation...
...The fundamental reason that the ideas of humane Liberalism have conduced to such illiberal unrest is that the Liberal professors simply do not have much confidence in what they are teaching...
...An even rosier report arrived from the Geographic Society which revealed that the average honey bee gets about four million miles to a gallon of nectar...
...CONTINUING CRISIS (continued from page 2) Richard B. Russell, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee followed him on 2\ January...
...Yet the struggle for an eseptic environment continued, and its forces could take heart when it was announced by the Department of the Interior that grizzly bears are no longer threatened with ex...
...A consequence of this which only worsens the intellectuals' thewlessness is that their antagonists are preaching a salvationary religion, and as Max Weber has said, such religions attract social strata in decline...
...And there is a puckish charm about what is seen as an "emerging youth culture...
...It is sort of agreed upon, but no longer vital...
...And, come to think of it, someone should have written a boring editorial on it...
...Those unencumbered by research have been busy altering the skyline of American society in an extraordinary post-war building boom which turns many a sleepy hollow into a cosmopolitan city-state almost overnight...
...Relativism is a potent influence...
...It is to Liberal ideas and to the state of those ideas' adherents that the Scranton Report should have devoted more study...
...Why let us be cautious about forcing our values on another...
...Manson's mother informed the nation that her son "...was real musical and had a real nice voice, so I gave him singing lessons...
...When interviewed by the Los Angeles Times Mr...
...Values...
...As expected the six month trial of youth leader, Mr...
...Recently, Irving Kristol wrote to this society of dissipating values that the skepticism over values has begun "to upset and challenge the most ordinary decencies and civilities...
...What those consequences have been the campus commission never bothered with very much...
...But, if my speculations suggest a connection between the state of ideas among professors and campus tumult, perhaps you will join me in finding the Scranton Report remiss for not devoting the same intensity of concern for the university's ideas as for the "emerging" student's pilosity...
...This century has burned out a lot of ideologies...
...But the controversial SST lived, as advocates of the supersonic transport reincarnated it during the last hours of the Ninety-First Congress...
...Through the years it has picked up other "good causes," but in advancing this slender definition I have conveyed enough of Liberalism's meaning to demonstrate that the anti-institutional New Left is antagonistic to Liberalism...
...The Marxism which so comforted the intellectuals in the Thirties frayed a little during the Moscow Trials...
...They reject its ideas and they loathe its ideals...
...But the highlight of the month came when Dwight Koga and Myra Gross, who met in San Francisco while cleaning oil-soaked birds from that Standard Oil tanker spill, were married on 30 January...
...People do not know what they ought to think about relations between the sexes, about relations between parents and children, about relations between the citizen and his government...
...It is not Goldwater Republicanism they rail at so much as Liberalism, and when they bomb Harvard or Wisconsin, they bomb Liberalism's shrines...
...Today it is the liberal arts professor...
...And if ideas do indeed have consequences, the Liberalism intoned by the professoriate must have held some consequences for the American university...
...John D. Lord explained that the woman customarily slept sitting up, but had recently taken to sleeping on her back...
...Charles Manson, ended with the conviction of Mr...
...Thus it is increasingly apparent that the crisis is very real...
...What one man values another may disdain...
...I admired George's editorial and published it gladly, but with a wince...
...Today it lies broken on the anvil of its own skeptics...
...This is not to imply that I favor the enforcement of one's values on others...
...After this century's second great war, the certitudes of the past have lost their magic...
...Udall was arrested by officer Harry E. Sparshott for stealing a ninety-five cent package of Cuenta Ray cigars from the Dart Drug Store of McLean, Virginia...
Vol. 4 • February 1971 • No. 4
