Correspondence
Correspondence Being & Big Mac.ness Lewisburg, Pa. To the Editors: I thought you'd be. charmed to know that in response to the Sartre article [July 4] I was sent two free hamburger tickets...
...In the end, the piece is more appropriate to a revival tent than to a forum for useful inquiry...
...We need to talk about the kinds of incentives and constraints facing alternative decision-makers, whether they wear bus- iness suits, military uniforms, or a re- former's halo...
...Yet one wonders to what extent the psychological factors needed to main- rain the cohesiveness and moral authority of the family are also those that contri- bute to susceptibility to ideology...
...Inter-generational estrangement has numerous roots, many of them having nothing to do with "the ambiguity of modern life...
...Forster cannily termed "petty unselfishness...
...Copyright © 1980 Commonweal Pub- fishing Co...
...It turns out that one of our local McDonald franchise owners is also a Commonweal reader...
...charmed to know that in response to the Sartre article [July 4] I was sent two free hamburger tickets to McDonald's...
...Los Angeles, Calif...
...This is not a matter of being "fair" to opponents, but of being straight with readers...
...II I Commonweal: 482...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN Mythstatements...
...We may even need to go back to the nature of man himself, and what the limitations of his knowledge and morality imply about the kinds of social processes he can and cannot handle...
...bar, Mi...
...so-called "'conservative economics" is taught, it must be the University of...
...Indeed, there is not a single word of praise for businessmen anywhere in Adam Smith's 900-page classic, The Wealth of Nations...
...To blame such alienation on Social Security is just plain silly (all the more so for the vast inadequacy of the system)• "Set out in the world with no family • . . we will simply be captured by the reigning ideologies of the day...
...Hauerwas dismisses reservations about bringing children into a precarious world ~ "an act of despair that often masks the deepest kind of self-hate and disgust...
...If there is any place where...
...From what do ideologies, whether religious or secular, derive their strength if not from the creation of that "privileged emo-tional climate" that Hauerwas tells us is the family's primary characteristic...
...It is just that kind of rhetoric that fed the romanticism of World War I infantrymen who marched forward to end all wars without their helmets on their heads...
...Hauerwas writes as if the statistics on familial cruelty were the stuff of literature, grist for the manufacture of fine phrases in a didactic essay...
...But then as a compendium of dirty politics he offers manipulative parental sacrifice --as if the varieties of psychological abuse and intrafamilial warfare went no further than the Jewish Mother syndrome (or what E.M...
...1 ] is less helpful than it first appears to anyone struggling with the significance and humane functioning of the family...
...Hauerwas seems unaware that "the falseness of this world" (an offensive term on humanist grounds and more than a little presumptuous) includes his own hortatory solemnity and its resulting distortions...
...Chicago, where I studied under Milton Friedman...
...Correspondence Being & Big Mac.ness Lewisburg, Pa...
...p. 498, Mar&ulie...
...The lack of affection and regard between generations is, too often, sadly earned...
...Perhaps...
...Illm~qons: p. 489, American Federatlonist (AFL-CIO...
...In the trenches of the lived life, shrapnel is all too real...
...Hauerwas concedes that the politics of the family" are too often the dirtiest politics of them all...
...His final glum reminder that neither life nor marriage is about happiness is nothing more than finger-wagging in the face of the self-evident--the liberal tradition at its most fatuous• MAUREEN MULLARKEY Commonwea/ is indexed in Reader's Guide to Pe,iodical Litentture, Catholic Periodical Index, Index of Ameriean Periodical Verse, Book Review Digest and Book Review Index...
...p. 492, Rita Corbin...
...To the Editors: Far more than we need any particular economic or political doc- trine, we need honest confrontation of opposing views...
...Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...The "wisdom" of the elderly is, as much as anything, a literary conceit...
...I cannot recall ever hearing businessmen praised at the University of Chicago...
...A distinguished Chicago economist named Jacob Viner once pointed out that an impressive socialist oration could be constructed out of Adam Smith's many denunciations of businessmen and discussions of market imperfections...
...But for those of us who have grown up with incest (a surprisingly common by-product of the "intensity of family life"), with schizophrenia or alcoholism, or with the covert destructiveness of ordinary family members, "to be stuck with a history and a people" is to be seared for life...
...p. 493...
...Who says the Lord does not work in mysterious ways His wonders to achieve...
...Microfilm from VoL I, 1924, to current issues available through Univendty Microfilm, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann At...
...48106...
...And for evidence we need some- thing much more substantial than quota- tions from the sacred writings of Galbraith or Veblen...
...p. 497, Bubeck, Handelsblatt...
...What seems, in places, to be an attempt to desentimentalize our notion of family or to examine the societal stresses that affect family dynamics, turns out to be just one more call to reinforce the fiber of the family...
...Pica...
...To the Editors: Stanley Hauerwas' "The Moral Meaning of the Family" [Aug...
...Running through his whole discussion is an assumption that so-called "conservative economics" is a defense of businessmen, or depends on the virtues or wisdom of businessmen...
...p. 500, YaUot...
...of California, Los Angeles Family revival time Broo~ya, N.Y...
...There are serious and fundamental issues of economic efficiency and (more important) human freedom that need to be explored, but which are ignored in the kind of good guys-versus-bad guys picture presented by Professor DuBoff...
...Richard B. DuBoff's "The New Economic Mythology" [July 4] is itself shot through with mythology and misstatements of the issues...
...Serials Data program No.: ISSN 0010-3330...
...THOMAS SOWELL Professor of Economics, Univ...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 16
