Ideas in Battle
KIMBALL, ROGER
Ideas in Battle A publisher’s refl ection. BY ROGER KIMBALL At a June 4 meeting in Washington to observe the tenth anniversary of Encounter Books, sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Bradley...
...it also, and more importantly, paralyzes our powers of resistance to them...
...vu all over again...
...he merely assumes that because conservatives are not beating a gong called “change” they have run out of ideas...
...A battle of wills, a contest of values, a war of ideas, was initiated—or at least openly acknowledged—on September 11...
...And this fact tempts me to indulge in an extended parenthesis...
...Indeed, September 11 precipitated a crisis the end of which we cannot see...
...There is much more that might be said about Packer’s article...
...As the Australian philosopher David Stove pointed out, we in the West “set ourselves to achieve a society which would be maximally tolerant...
...In a sense, the actions of those terrorists were less an attack on the United States than part of what the former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “a war to reverse the triumph of the West...
...It is part of the responsible exercise of intelligence to recognize the difference between ideas that work and produce desirable outcomes, and those which merely produce a species of moral intoxication...
...We certainly live in interesting times...
...The work of the Spanishborn American philosopher George Santayana is not as well known today as it should be...
...As the political philosopher Samuel Huntington has noted, the attack on American identity has counterparts elsewhere in the West wherever the doctrine of multiculturalism has trumped the cause of national identity...
...Although it is not universally acknowledged, especially in Washington, Moynihan was right about that, as recent American political history amply attests on issues from welfare and taxes to free markets and national security...
...I’ll confi ne myself here to noting his description of the New Criterion as a “dour” publication, a characterization which suggests that Packer either doesn’t know what the word “dour” means, that he has never read the New Criterion, or that he was engaged in this article primarily in a species of ideological combat masquerading as journalism...
...Ultimately, victory in the confl ict that besieges us will be determined not by smart weapons but by smart heads...
...That is to say, the confl ict is not so much—not only—a military confl ict as a confl ict of world views, of ideas...
...If a commitment to “diversity” mandates bilingual education, then we must institute bilingual education, even if it results in the cultural disenfranchisement of those it was meant to benefi t. The passion for equality demands “affi rmative action,” even though the process of affi rmative action depends upon treating people unequally...
...And part of that acknowledgment lies in reaffi rming the core values that are under attack...
...The newsstand edition even featured a headline wondering whether the GOP was “brain dead,” a question which prompted me to ask “compared to whom...
...We have yet to learn—even now, even at this late date—that promises of liberation often turn out to conceal new enchantments and novel forms of bondage...
...The murderous fanatics who destroyed the World Trade Center, smashed into the Pentagon, and killed thousands of innocent civilians, took the issue of multiculturalism out of the fetid atmosphere of the graduate seminar and into the streets...
...But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally-intolerant society...
...Consider, to take just one issue that Encounter has weighed in on often, the various efforts to deconstruct American identity and replace it with a multicultural “rainbow” or supranational bureaucracy...
...We are still very far from being in a position to assess the full signifi cance of September 11 for the simple reason that the detonations that began that day continue to reverberate...
...But the United States, the most powerful national state, is also the most attractive target for deconstruction...
...Ideas that have been tried and found wanting...
...Where, one wonders, was the New Yorker’s vaunted factchecking department...
...Why had they not scrupled to verify the many misquotations and mischaracterizations that bedizen the piece...
...My point is that when we speak of publishing and the power of ideas, we need to give at least as much attention to criticizing seductive bad ideas as we do to promulgating the good ones...
...Packer’s article was unsatisfactory in ways large and small...
...it is fearsome also because of the many bad things that we thought we had vanquished only to see them striding buoyantly over the horizon once more...
...What sacrifi ces were made by our forbears to bequeath us the richest, freest, most physically secure society in history...
...Packer seemed to mistake intellectual sobriety with intellectual weakness...
...the multifarious utopian schemes for universal beatitude...
...Since September 11, these issues have taken on a new urgency...
...tried and found to be disastrous: the totalitarian temptation in all its many guises...
...I know what he means...
...At such a time, simply remembering where we have been as a culture is of paramount importance...
...How did we arrive at our present prosperity...
...The European Union—whose unelected leaders are as dedicated to multicultural shibboleths as they are to rule by top-down, antidemocratic bureaucracy—is a case in point...
...Indeed, because vital good ideas that impinge upon politics and social life tend to be elaborations of relatively simple home truths, the critical project of exposing bad ideas is often tantamount to revealing the good ideas that the bad ideas had obscured or perverted...
...It corroborates James Burnham’s observation that “liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution...
...Recently the New Yorker ran a long piece by George Packer about the alleged bankruptcy of conservative ideas...
...BY ROGER KIMBALL At a June 4 meeting in Washington to observe the tenth anniversary of Encounter Books, sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books, offered some introductory remarks, “Encounter and the Power of Ideas...
...Part of the task that faces us now is to acknowledge the depth of barbarism that challenges the survival of culture...
...Compared with the situation a few decades ago, conservative ideas enjoy enormous infl uence in our society nearly everywhere that doesn’t begin with the words “University of . . .” On economic matters, for example, it is widely understood that low taxes and free markets conduce to the production of wealth, and that what Friedrich Hayek called “the extended order of cooperation,” aka capitalism, is enormously more successful at ensuring prosperity and underwriting liberty than any of the sentimental, socialistic alternatives on offer...
...The truth is that conservative ideas are regnant, and those who support them understand the wisdom of Lord Falkland’s observation that “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change...
...Who are we, we Americans of the 21st century...
...But nearly everyone knows Santayana’s observation that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...
...It always inspires a certain fear and trembling, especially when I remember it in conjunction with that old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times...
...I wonder what he would say were he with us today...
...But let me return to Pat Moynihan...
...It is part of Encounter’s mission to resuscitate those essential cultural memory markers and speak frankly about the constellation of ideas that lead, and mislead, contemporary public life...
...efforts to curtail freedom in the name of an abstract republic of virtue—all these ideas were thoroughly discredited only yesterday but, like some strange villain out of a science fi ction movie, they have suddenly changed shape and are poised to attack again...
...These options, I should note, are not mutually exclusive...
...It is an age in which “faster” is synonymous with “better,” when yesterday seems like ancient history, and when empty hortatory words like “change,” “audacity,” and “innovation” are widely regarded as benefi cent talismans of universal future happiness— a happiness that never actually arrives but which, so we are told, is always just around the corner...
...That reaffi rmation is another part of Encounter’s mandate...
...As the publisher of Encounter Books, a press concerned with ideas and public policy, I often think of Santayana’s admonition...
...Or, rather, they dramatized the fact that multiculturalism was never a merely academic matter...
...Packer points to no leftliberal ideas that can compete with conservative ideas...
...It is a curious, not to say alarming, development...
...For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature...
...And it is worth pausing to note that a crucial part of remembering is facing up to reality, which means having the courage to call things by their real names...
...Such efforts have made astonishing inroads in the last few decades and, especially, in the last several years...
...What good ideas did the Founders of this republic promulgate to our eventual benefi t? Equally important, what bad ideas did they shackle, tame, and inoculate us against...
...Freedom, diversity, equality, tolerance, even democracy—how many defi nitive liberal virtues have been redacted into their opposites by the imperatives of political correctness...
...It is much too early to predict the course of that confl ict...
...It is worth stressing the bad ideas...
...One of the most corrosive legacies of political correctness is the culture of intellectual and moral euphemism that results...
...More than two decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan ruefully noted that Republicans had become “the party of ideas...
...Santayana’s observation about the dangers of forgetting the past is fearsome not only because of the good things we might miss, should forgetting progress and metastasize...
...It was the philosopher Samuel Goldwyn, I believe, who spoke of feeling as if it were “d?j...
...And that is where institutions like Encounter Books can play an important role...
Vol. 13 • July 2008 • No. 42
