The Tennyson curve

...We are still suffering the ill effects of the indiscriminate reaction against Victorianism that took place early in our century, when legions of healthy babies were thrown out amidst great quantities of sentimental bathwater...

...But I'm not concerned here with the Laffer Curve for its own sake...

...The public, always enthusiastic for the practical, has responded by spending vast sums of money for colleges and universities...

...Louis restaurant applies perfectly to the suburbs: "Nobody goes there anymore-it's too crowded...

...Clever but not candid educators in need of funds have long palmed this pleasant fiction off on the public: that education is essentially a practical affair, that the fundamental aim of education is to make us all rich, both individually and collectively...

...Few curves, it seems, enter their downward phase so quickly as this one...

...The rule appears to be that the more nearly a church resembles the American Civil Liberties Union, the more likely it is to be empty...

...For instance-and this is the Laffer sub-class of the Tennyson Curve-if you raise tax rates too high you'll undermine your tax base and ultimately diminish your tax returns...

...Declaring your belief in peace through strength, you build up your armaments until you precipitate your own (and the world's) destruction...

...ate legislature...

...4. The Hugh Hefner Curve...

...You start a magazine proclaiming that sex, so far from being dirty, isn't even serious...

...In some circles this is now called the Ronald Reagan Curve...

...1. The Newman Curve (named after Cardinal Newman, author of The idea of a University...

...On the same program Jude Wanniski, who tirelessly promoted Laffer and supply-side economics on the editorial pages of the Walt Street Journal, was permitted to appear in the dignified role of conservative critic of Reaganomics...

...Hence the plan recently approved by the National Governors Conference as part of their high technology program: remove the few remaining academic humanists from America's colleges and universities and put them on a reservation-a kind of humanistic zoowhile their old campuses are turned over to computer-literate engineers and MBAs who spend their weekends self-actualizing, preferably on ski slopes...

...A few months ago, for instance, NBC News did an end-of the-year special titled "Reagan at Mid-Term," in which a cheerful Laffer, amid vignettes of encircling economic gloom, told us how optimistic he is about the state of the American economy...

...What interests me is the fact that it's a sub-class of a more general curve long ago discovered by Alfred Lord Tennyson...

...But the trick is to find the precise point at which they become true, the moment at which the downward phase of the curve begins...

...The principle was enunciated in the lines spoken by-Arthur (nor Arthur Laffer but Arthur the King) just before his death: God fulfills Himself in many ways...

...who spent much of his career lamenting the suburbanization of America...

...David R. Carlin...

...But the whole charm of the thing depended on the sparseness of suburban population...

...It's unfair, of course, to place the blame for the theoretical side of Reaganomics on a single man, but Laffer and his celebrated curve (not to mention the restaurant napkin it was first drawn on) are such inviting targets that it's difficult to resist the temptation...

...But in America at least, we've entered the downward phase of the curve...

...Yogi Ber-ra's famous remark about a certain St...

...Time was when the suburbs were lovely places, quiet villages nestled in the countryside, fur but not too far from the madding crowd of city life...

...So complete has the obliteration been that I haven't found a single contemporary reference to the Tennyson Curve, which once made such a stir in the world...

...Lest one good custom should corrupt the world...

...In erasing "Tears, idle tears" from their memory, our fathers and grandfathers forgot that Tennyson was one of the great social theorists of the nineteenth century, ranking only a few steps below Hegel, Marx, and Mill...

...In its Catholic variant it's the Aggiornamento Curve...

...The idea here is that if you take any good practice (or "custom") and push it too far, you'll spoil it...

...Oh, he's not heavy, darling, he's my Ganymede.'') 5. The Kaiser Wilhelm Curve...

...Unquestionably this has often happened in the course of human history-in the empires of the ancient world, for instance...

...So Laffer has to take the heat...

...For a long time this strategy of deceit (a modern instance of Plato's "noble lie") worked, and schooling with a practical orientation actually succeeded in raising the world's educational level...

...2. The World Council of Churches Curve...

...A few decades later you have massive abortions, vast numbers of illegitimate children born to teenagers from the poorest strata of society, and a delightful organization named the North American Man-Boy Love Association going on national TV to explain that your basic pedophile, contrary to the opinion of still-puritanical America, is not a pervert and child moles-ter but rather a lonely boy's best friend, his protector and educator-a sort of latter-day equivalent of Father Flanagan...

...If corrective action is taken either too soon or too late, disaster ensues...

...Jr., a previous contributor, is a senator in the Rhode Island state legislature...

...Everyone laughs at him nowadays, as the curve of his reputation, having passed through its zenith, plunges toward the lower depths...

...say, history, literature, or philosophy...

...Just look at this smiling nitwit," NBC was suggesting...

...3. The Mumford Curve (named for Lewis Mumford...

...So convinced is everyone that education ought to be practical and nothing but practical that it's nearly impossible nowadays to find an undergraduate foolish enough to study voluntarily anything so impractical as...

...But whether the point of over-taxation has already been reached in American society, as Laffer and friends assumed, is another question...

...Yet Wanniski is, if anything, more to blame for the Reaganomics fiasco than Laffer...

...Once the crowds rushed in searching for that charm, it quite naturally vanished...

...That's the way the world works...

...In order to make religion more attractive to the minlern, secular consciousness, you drop its archaic trappings and redesign it in a rational, up-to-date fashion...

...The Tennyson Curve has a hundred-and-one subclasses, all of them true...

...it's just good, clean fun...

...In the nineteenth century it was known as the Unitarian Cune...

...But the Journal editor, though he may have thrown us a few curves, never drew one, never had one named after him...