Looking Backward

...Unfortunately misled by the effort to find some essence of"communitarianism," Derek Phillips never identifies his authors' major themes clearly enough to subject them to critique...

...Two chapters on early America follow, then two on the Middle Ages, finally one on ancient Athens, plus instructions on "Learning from History...

...And so it goes...

...Various scholars have chronicled the idiom...

...Shifting back and forth in time, it is sharpened by historical insights and reflections of the heart...

...These tutorials are neither startling nor particularly gripping in their recitation of the oppressions and violence of the allegedly more "communal" societies of the past...

...The danger is that the polemicist will allow indignation to distort perception into caricature and then seriously try to dismantle a straw figure...

...The structure of The Hidden Law is deliberately provocative...

...The bulk of this book, then, represents a sort of sociology of the past," he writes...

...Not until the final chapter are thematic patterns arising from a close reading of the poems explicitly discussed, such as Auden's effort to integrate the polarities of public and private life, and his conviction that frivolity is the foundation of an ethical poetry...

...Phillips wants to debunk this nostalgic idealization of the past by showing that the good old days weren't nearly so rosy...

...All are found to be not only "highly critical of political individualism and liberalism" but also "emphasize very similar features in characterizing social groups as communities...

...A SWING & A MISS LOOKING BACKWARD A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought Derek L. Phillips Princeton University Press, $29.95, 248 pp...

...The argument Phillips misses is the claim that the survival of liberal goods is threatened by public and theoretical languages, not to say social developments, which ignore or run down those sustaining social and moral contexts and curtail discussion of them...

...Together they recorded songs and life-tales of singers-even men in prison...

...The Hidden Law draws a very strong line between poetry and prose...

...Hecht writes, "For I find it always requires active moral energy simply to keep from doing harm to others even inadvertently, and that, in view of the ever present inequities in human life, we can never be unaware of the unmerited suffering around us which we cannot hope ever to fully repair...

...Transitions between poems are abrupt...

...But Phillips claims that what"communitarians" have in common is the effort to restate this old dichotomy to the detriment of rightthinking liberal minds...

...This line of thinking, however, hardly advances Phillips's efforts to clarify the contemporary scene...

...More than a memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began recounts Lomax's journeys over the last half-century...

...As an historian and collector of songs, his career spans the era in which blues music rose from remote Southern hollows to an internationally commercial art form...

...This, of course, is that staple of introductory sociology texts, Ferdinand Tonnies's contrast between the lost warmth of Gemeinschafi and the chilliness of modern Gesellschafi...

...Phillips at one point claims that these alleged differences stem from different views of the self, in which communitarians stress the "emergent" and unchosen features of identity which result from the contingencies of birth and history, while liberals want to emphasize "selfcreation" and play down the ways in which selves are "products of our social relations...

...The Symposium will examine the four books of the Catechism on successive days through major presentations, workshops, panel discussions and forums...

...Against this stance the critic pits his own (and implicitly, Auden's) richer understanding of "nothing," and the more ethical struggle to be and produce something "harmless...

...Phillips asserts that while "social ties, attachments, and fellow feeling" are necessary for human well-being, they need not entail "relatedness in terms of the group or collective," nor find their source in "the community...

...There, Hecht mounts a full-scale attack on T.S...

...In his many books, articles, and films Alan Lomax has left a singular mark on that history: his poetic voice, driven by a passion for the musician's struggle, radiates on every page he writes...

...Reading this book you feel the enormous debt Hecht owes to the clearsighted and modest claims for poetry with which Auden blessed the generation of poets who came of age during World War II...

...PRESENTERS: Susan Muto Archbishop William Levada AuguJtine DiNoia Francis Kelly Benedict Ashley John Haas Timothea Elliot Mary Jo Tully William Murphy M. Francis Mannion Michael Maslowsky George Niederauer Sponsored by the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon FEBRUARY 7 TO 11, 1994 FOR INFORMATION OR REGISTRATION: ARCHDIOCESE OF PORTLAND IN OREGON OFFICE OF MINISTRY FORMATION 2838 E. BURNSIDE STREET, PORTLAND, OR 97214 Ill (503)233-839 l/FAX(503)234-2545 Ill m mini m m --III-- REGISTRATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 24, 1994 "111-Commonweal 17 December 1993:19Phillips proceeds to "uncover the communitarian ideal," asserting that it continues the critique of modern society put forward in the nineteenth century by thinkers nostalgic for a lost premodern world...

...Finally, though, we get to a strong, if not entirely clear, statement of the book's thesis...

...Despite some useE' ful observations along the way, in Looking Backward: A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought, Derek L. Phillips proceeds to do just that...

...What is missing from Phillips's thin theory of "attachments" is the recognition that the goods he most praises, such as individual agency, dignity, and critical inquiry, cannot be sustained over time apart from ongoing patterns of collective action and practice...

...In accord with this scheme, each chapter is centered on a single volume of poetry and involves close readings of individual poems...

...The thematic exposition of the book is tacit rather than explicit...

...The reader of Hecht's poetry will recognize his precision but will need a moment to adjust to the willfully prosaic style...

...Eliot's view, professed in his essay on Baudelaire's Sat-,nism, that "it is better to do evil...than to do nothing...

...Put in his terms, self-avowed "bourgeois liberals" who stress the contingency of thought and identity, such as Richard Rorty, must be classified as "communitarian...

...Part of Lomax' s influence on writers who cover music is his insistence on treating the lyrics, rhythms, and body language of dance steps as a cultural vocabulary, a coded way of embracing life among those 20:17 December 1993 Commonweal...

...There Phillips tries to stage a head-to-head confrontation between the approaches of the "communitarians" and those of a variety of philosophical liberals...

...We need his rigorous and attentive interpretation too much...

...PASSION LYRICS THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN Alan Lomax Pantheon, $25,540 pp...

...William M. Sullivan E or writers, the appeal of polemic over critique is obvious...

...In order to get a better orientation, begin with the final chapter where Hecht reveals his intention to write a book "without any prior agenda": "I determined to address myself to those poems, collections, essays, plays, or fragments of Auden's recorded conversations that particularly delighted, interested, or (sometimes) provoked me, but especially those works that inspired admiration or seemed to demand comment and elucidation...

...That is, liberal values, like all human goods, depend upon a complex social network of practices and institutions...

...Part of the history which counts here is trying to understand how such a fundamental recognition could have been eclipsed in much modern thought and action...

...Of prisons, he writes: "Despite the guards, who sat by during all the recording sessions, despite our own pale faces, which must have seemed like masks of indifference to so many of them, the convicts filled our records with a thousand moving songs, an epic of hot sun and brutality and human courage, mounted upon sincere and profound melodies...

...With a muckraker' s zeal, he began traveling rural backroads during the Depression with his father, John, whose folk music writings set a high standard...

...While critique demands that one present the best arguments of the work in question in order to show its limits, the genre of polemic has few rules of fair play...

...The writers principally considered-Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and the authors of Habits of the Heart (of which the reviewer is one)~are by "considerable agreement" judged to be "the major communitarian thinkers...

...Jason Berry lan Lomax, now nearly eighty years old, is a legendary figure in the annals of American popular music...

...Here, labels such as "communitarian" aside, the significance of the arguments surrounding the authors Phillips criticizes begins to appear...

...The patient reader will find more to ponder in the concluding chapter, "A Liberal Reply to Communitarian Thought...

...One only hopes that his concluding salvos and the structural aggressiveness of this book do not signal Hecht's straying into the abyss of the current culture wars...

...The central issue here turns out to be that while liberals want to exalt the freedom, dignity, and self-determination of persons, communitarians "and their nineteenthcentury counterparts emphasize the primacy of the collective life over the individual...

...IYMPOSIUM ON THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURC A national symposium bringing together experts in various theological and catechetical disciplines to examine the content and pastoral implications of the Catechism of the Catholic Church...

...Something like this, and not nostalgic appeals for Gemeinschafi, is closer to the core of the criticisms of liberal individualism, atomism, and abstraction found in Maclntyre, Taylor, and others...

...Thus, for Phillips, whatever particular authors say, "community" must mean common territory, common history and values, a widespread participation in common activities, and a high degree of solidarity, especially as expressed in emotional attachments springing from ascribed rather than achieved status...

...What counts, we are told, is not "membership" or participation but "attachment...

...Hecht, who teaches at Georgetown University, wants to outrage colleagues who inflate their iraportance by studying ever smaller portions of a poet' s life and work or who have critical preoccupations to which a "poet and his work are tortured into conformity...

...Phillips's strategy is to take the loose usage of "communitarian" as a label for a variety of current writers on social and political issues, and try to find in that label a conceptual core centered on the notion of "community...