Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead: Court Challenges Program

Amidst the cuts the Conservatives made:  Court Challenges Program.

Soup to Nuts

Now that we’ve had an entire newscycle to digest the juxtaposing of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech and its associated reaction with Bill Clinton’s All Too Human finger wagging, its time to reflect upon the quintessential malaise that seems to follow Bill Clinton wherever he goes. I’ve thumbed through a few volumes, including George Stephanapolous’s All Too Human; a decent, if biased, read.

But, for me, nothing sums up Bill and the 1990’s like Dr. Thomas Hibbs’ wonderful book, written as the 1990’s drew to a close, Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture. Listen to the interview or read the transcript. Now, think hard. Doesn’t Clinton’s blow up remind you of the dramatic pointless Soup Nazi episode?

Postscript: Michael Rubin of NRO’s The Corner, gives us a helpful reminder of Yale University’s 25 year rule when performing historical analysis.

Lee Harris on Benedict’s Speech on Reason

The always excellent Lee Harris has an excellent longish editorial on Benedict’s speech at Regensburg. It has little to do with jihad, and more to do with the “destiny of reason.” Some nuggets:

If modern reason cannot concern itself with the question of God, then it cannot argue that a God who commands jihad is better or worse than a God who commands us not to use violence to impose our religious views on others. To the modern atheist, both Gods are equally figments of the imagination, in which case it would be ludicrous to discuss their relative merits. The proponent of modern reason, therefore, could not possibly think of participating in a dialogue on whether Christianity or Islam is the more reasonable religion, since, for him, the very notion of a “reasonable religion” is a contradiction in terms.

On the quote that caused so much controversy:

Modern science cannot tell us that the emperor is right in his controversy with the learned Persian over what is or is not contrary to God’s nature. Modern reason proclaims such questions unanswerable by science–and it is right to do so. But can modern reason hope to survive as reason at all if it insists on reducing the domain of reasonable inquiry to the sphere of scientific inquiry? If modern reason cannot take the side of the emperor in this debate, if it cannot see that his religion is more reasonable than the religion of those who preach and practice jihad, if it cannot condemn as unreasonable a religion that forces atheists and unbelievers to make a choice between their intellectual integrity and death, then modern reason may be modern, but it has ceased to be reason.

But Benedict is not trying to “turn back the clock” on reason, to some pre-Enlightenment view:

It is important to stress that Ratzinger is not repudiating the critical examination of reason that was initiated by Kant. Instead, he is urging us to examine the cultural and historical conditions that made the emergence of modern reason possible. Modern reason required a preexisting community of reasonable men before it could emerge in the West; modern reason, therefore, could not create the cultural and historical condition that made its own existence possible. But in this case, modern reason must ask itself: What created the communities of reasonable men that eventually made modern reason possible?

Ultimately, Benedict defends reason because God is reasonable:

Intimately connected with the concept of God as a rational Creator who wishes for us to be able to understand the reason behind the universe is the concept of a God who will behave reasonably toward us. He will not be delighted when we grovel before him, nor will he demand that we worship him in “fear and trembling.” Instead, he will be a God who prefers for us to feel reverence and gratitude towards him.

Read the whole thing.

Previous posts on Harris’s work: here, here, and here.

Increased Terrorist Threat?

Robert Kagan questions the methodology of the NIE assessment of the terrorist threat, as well as the media’s spin.

For want of a diplomat…

Diplomacy, which is now an underpaid and ill-supplied professsion, requires more than the ability to put a perpetually good face on ugly facts or evil intentions; it requires an awareness of other’s minds which is one of the chief attributes of the prose writer, second only to his capacity for meeting argument with finesse and clear reason. A self-centered diplomat, an incoherent diplomat, are contradictions in terms. Yet one wonders whence the recruits to such a calling will come when it is so ill-rewarded, when the study of foreign languages is hampered by the abolition of the native grammar, and when more and more of our university students can barely rank as monoglots.

The House of Intellect, Jacques Barzun (1959)

The common man soon acquires a vocabulary in excess of his needs, thanks to which he is never at a loss for the wrong word.

ibid. 

How many is a handful?

Commenter Da Zing, in a previous post comment asks:

How much is “less than a handful” precisely?

Preamble: I draw the same analogy for more obscure fields. I don’t think the world is awash with philologists who specialize in Old Norse or Anglo Saxon (think about the prospects in a generation of there being no one to teach future students about the beginnings of the English language). I also don’t think that Semitic philologists or classically trained historical philologists like Kristeller are being produced in the numbers needed. Read the text of Kristeller’s address. Can you imagine a North American student being exposed to that kind of classical cirriculum? Even in Alberta’s best schools?

I’ll worm my way out of this one by simply referring to an interesting blog post at First Things awhile back. Russ Hittinger mused out loud — to the extent that an email exchange is musing out loud — about the state of North American Catholic thought, first in philosophy and then, in turn, Theology and Religious studies:

Once upon a time, in a field like philosophy, the Catholic B-team was immense. Every major Jesuit university had three or four just among the clerics, not to mention the lay faculty. I myself would not have qualified for the Catholic B-team of 1965. Today, for purposes of the A-team in the field of philosophy, it would be merely Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, with the possible additions of Robert Sokolowski and Jean-Luc Marion. Interestingly, only one is an American by birth, none are Americans by training, and all but Marion are close to retirement. I don’t suspect that we will fare much better in Theology or Religious Studies, though there will be a decent-enough B-team.

I wouldn’t prattle on in this vein, except for the fact that your estimation of the “thought” part of the equation doesn’t square with my experience. Haven’t you noticed that whenever we go to public events where academics are supposed to lend some weight to the occasion, it is always the same people? When I lecture overseas, European Catholics will always say how lucky we are to have so many serious thinkers. They are right at one level. But, then, when you look around, you can’t help but notice that it is always the same six or so people. And, if the truth be known, what they really have in mind are not academics, but non-academics who have done so well in influencing the great cultural and moral debates in the public square. That’s what they lack in Europe.

Bob Rae as Liberal Leader?

Conservative Party strategists must be salivating at news that Bob Rae leads in popularity among Liberal Party members.

I haven’t seen any national polling data, but consider this:

• Bob Rae was NDP premier of Ontario and lots of Ontarians still harbor a visceral hatred for the man
• Bob Rae is backed by the Chretien gang, which means that Quebecers will hate him

Bob Rae seems unelectable in Ontario and Quebec. Considering the Liberals are by and large unelectable in the West (except for parts of the lower mainland and a smattering of seats in SK and MB), this means that the Liberals are primed to become the rump party of the Maramichi.

The Liberal party of the Maramachi. I like the sound of that.

More Evidence of Vengeful Catholics

And you thought the “fundies” were bad:

Pope Benedict XVI has praised an Italian nun for pardoning her killers as she lay dying in Somalia from an attack that may have been linked to Muslim anger over his remarks about Islam and violence.

Rotten Catholics, going and making it so hard for the mainstream left to criticize Christians. Why can’t Pat Robertson say something stupid at times like this?

Pinochle, Pinochet and Karl Marx

From my personal experience with various ideologists of a Hegelian or Marxist type, I have the impression that a good number of men of considerable intellectual energy who otherwise would be Marxists prefer to be Hegelians because Hegel is so much more complicated.

This is a difference not of any profound conviction but of what I would compare to the taste of a man who prefers chess to pinochle. Hegel is more complicated, and one can easily spend a lifetime exploring the possibilities of interpreting reality from this or that corner of the Hegelian system, without of course ever touching on the premises that are wrong—and perhaps without ever finding out that there are premises that are wrong.

More pungent observations by Eric Voegelin. Bet ya can’t read just one.

A Life of Learning

Faddist theories based on sensational claims rather than on solid evidence are widely acclaimed, and the advocacy of political, ideological or religious causes is brazenly proclaimed to be a substitute for evidence. A widespread antihistorical bias has put historical studies on the defensive, and in the academic power game, faddists and ideologists are often preferred to serious younger scholars, not to speak of the steady loss of teaching positions in subjects that are no longer required or considered useful or interesting. It has been noticed in more than one area that the number of persons of any age, properly trained and competent to deal with certain specialties, amounts to less than a handful in the entire country.

The late Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Charles Homer Haskins Lecture (1990)

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