Posted on 06/03/2004 1:50:17 AM PDT by The Raven
I have been paying attention to the graduates of Ivy League universities. Every one I see the past few weeks is beautiful. They are tall and handsome and gay-spirited; they are strong and laughing and bright. I ask them what they are going to do now. I am repeatedly told things like, "I want to go into TV." And "I'm going to drama school." And "I'm going to journalism school." It occurs to me that all young people who graduate from elite American universities now want to go into communications. It's a whole generation that wants to communicate.
But what do they want to communicate? They don't seem to have a clue. For this is a question that involves the area of Deeply Held Beliefs, and as far as I can see it the deeply held beliefs of these particular graduates is a uniform leftism whose tenets involve reciting clichés. They believe racial and sexual diversity is good, peace is better than war, religious fanaticism is bad. But they don't want to spout clichés--that's not why they went to Cornell. And they know their work will not draw attention if it is marked by tired and essentially noncontroversial ideas. No one thinks war is sweet, there's no market for racial segregation or male chauvinism.
SNIP
I wondered if the loss of a kind of national manliness, or force, tends to coincide in modern nations with a rise in expertise in the delicate arts. Then I thought: I wonder if in general one can say of Western nations that the loss of one tends to be accompanied by a rise in the other. In the case of England I think that is so. I have wondered for 30 years if I would come to think it of America. I have not. But the rise of the young graduates who all want to communicate but have no idea what they want to communicate has me thinking about it again.
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European bureaucrats continue to resist references to God or Christianity in the new constitution they are drafting for the European Union. This is a fascinating battle and revealing of our age. They are in the final drafting stages. Tuesday's New York Times reported, "The issue of whether the most ambitious document in European Union history should include a reference to the Continent's Christian heritage is . . . an emotional, theological wrangle over the meaning of culture, history and faith. The paper quoted France's foreign minister, Michel Barnier, as saying his country would not bow to pressure to inject religion into the document, noting the final draft should be "secular." The constitution is expected to be finalized in two weeks in Brussels. It seems to me the question is not, "Will the architects of the new Europe bow to the reality of God and include him in the central founding document of their vast new union?" The question is, "Will a group of atheist and agnostic European bureaucrats be forced to mention a deity in whom they do not believe in order to appease lesser and ignorant people who unfortunately have a lot of votes?" Europe is a post-Christian society on a continent devoted to the material except when it is considering astrology, witchcraft and worshiping rocks.
SNIP
Is it better if the drafters bow to pressure and, like hypocrites, add a few soulful sentences in which they do not believe so as to fool the dumb people who do? Maybe not. Maybe they should be what they are. It's less confusing that way. And the nonelites of Europe will perhaps more readily see what they are, and understand what they're getting into when they join the EU.
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SNIP
I have come to hate the banners. No, I don't smoke. I just believe in the right of people to be human, to be imperfect and messy and flawed. I don't dislike the banners because they're prissy bullies, though that is reason enough. I dislike them because their work forces us to look at the shift in values in our country in our time. As I watched the NBC report, I actually thought to myself: I want to make sure I understand. If you smoke a cigarette on a beach in modern America you are harming the innocent. If you have a baby scraped from your womb, you are protecting your freedom. If you sell a pack of cigarettes to a 12-year-old boy you can be jailed, fined and sent to Guantanamo Bay with the other killers. If you sell a pack of contraceptives to a 12 year old boy in modern America you are socially responsible citizen.
For reasons that call for an essay of their own, and as we all know, the banners of cigarettes are on and of the left, and the resisters of the banners are on the right. Once the banners of liquor were of the right and its legalizers of the left. The banners of drugs were on the right and the legalizers on the left.
Why did the left change its stance on what it calls personal freedom regarding cigarettes and cigars? What was the logic? And please, if you are on the left, would you answer this question for me? How come the only organ the left insists be chaste is the lung? What is this pulmocentrism? Why are lungs so special? Why can't you endanger your own lungs? Why don't you care as much about livers? Don't the Democrats have a liver lobby?
I think that it is true that there is no individual human on earth that I hate. But when I think of the banners I think of what the old news producer told the bureaucrat who fired him in a cost-cutting campaign in "Broadcast News." At the end of their meeting the bureaucrat asked in unctuous tones if there was anything he could do to help. The producer thought. "Well, I certainly hope you die soon," he said. A great cinematic moment. I wish the banners would go away and stop bothering our country.
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The presidential election began to take shape this week, almost in spite of itself. Did you notice? In a series of interviews and speeches President Bush made it clear he is running on three things: Iraq, and its profound promise for a better world in spite of the struggle; faith-based social reform, which is to say the allowance of the reality of God in certain publicly financed organizations aimed at helping the young and the stressed; and the legitimacy of his tax cuts, both their practical benefits and their inherent justice. This seems to me pretty smart as a way to go, and clear.
John Kerry, meanwhile, emerged with a new approach: future terrorism on U.S. soil is the great issue of our time, and Mr. Bush has not done enough to make America safer. It is smart of Mr. Kerry to get to Mr. Bush's right on this, and it will make the administration sharper. Mr. Kerry's is also an unanswerable challenge: There will of course be terror events down the road, and deadly ones, and it will always turn out that the government could have done more, for it always could have.
Mr. Kerry is also applying a kind of argumentative prophylactic: If al Qaeda hits before the election, he warned you. He is planting seeds so that your first thought, on the day of an event, is not I will support my president in this time of crisis but Bush didn't keep us safe, fire him!
But Mr. Kerry continues to have a major internal structural problem. It is that he can always tell you his position, or his latest position, but he can somehow never quite explain to you the thinking behind it. He continues to seem unable to explain the philosophy and logic. It leaves one assuming his problem is that his thinking relies on an old and cliché-riddled leftism that is not so much thought through as declared and imposed.
It is a paradox. Mr. Kerry is more naturally articulate than Mr. Bush. He is facile with words and speaks in structured sentences and paragraphs. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, speaks in bursts, in little gusts of words. And yet Mr. Bush manages to communicate why he is thinking what he is thinking, what logic is guiding him, what philosophy is guiding him. When he speaks of the practical and moral benefits of faith-based approach to federal spending, you understand why he stands where he stands. He explains it. His words are plain but serviceable. They do the job.
Mr. Kerry doesn't give you the feeling of comfort you get when you understand someone. He's going to have to become a candidate who can explain why he stands where he stands if he wants to go beyond the impression he currently gives, which is that he's a haircut with a person attached.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
But--the chief reasons for these kids wanting to go into communication are two--
1) They have a useless liberal-arts degree. They have to go to some kind of grad school.
2) Communications provides scope and stage for the Vain.
This is also (of all people) Nietzsche's insight in Die Froeliches Wissenschaft [The Gay Science in the famous Aphorism 125 concerning the death of God -- that the people mocking the madman (tollen mensch, a bit more nuanced in german) have themselves killed God, the greatest of all man's creations, but, though the deed has been done, it is as yet 'far off' and they don't realize what they have done. Nietzsche's athiesm (i.e., his view that man created God), this is remarkably perceptive -even to the notion that God is the noblest thing man can concieve- and thought-provoking. I have pondered on this aphorism often.
I disagree that the problem is the Enlightenment, but then my education was not scholastic, but rather in intellectual history and philosophy, and I regard the Enlightenment and its (primarily British) precursors to be the foundation of the philosophical basis which undergirds our republic. The difficulty, of course, is that Faith is not automatic for the mind that embraces the Englightenment. I would argue at length on a suitable occasion that the problem is most people's disinclination to think as hard as serious understanding of the Enligntenment (or Nietzsche, for that matter) requires, than the ideas of the Enlightenment itself.
Recall, that the position of the Church through the 18th and 19th centuries (and until recently in many ways) was ultramontane and fundamentally hostile to individual liberty as well as to classical liberalism and capitalism. A world in which the Englightenment was rejected to return (to paraphrase a line from Georges Hazard's Crise de la Consicence European [The Crisis of the European Mind]) to the world of a Bossuet, is one that would be on the road to medievealism similar to that which has mired islam.
Hey man, that was a beautiful post.
Bump for later!
Places to go,things to do-----not bad for an old lady smoker!
"he's a haircut with a person attached."
That's gonna leave a mark. LOL!
You're thinking British (Locke, Hume etc...), vanmo is thinking French (Rabelais,de Montaigne,Rousseau)
You're both right.
And both wrong...lol
On a number of your other points we agree:
surely, the lack of serious educational grounding in logic, theology (and I would add, philosophy and history) make it difficult for anyone to seriously and rigorously think or evaluate the mass of facts available.
I have often noticed, and been disturbed by the phenomenon you note with respect to children (youth, even adults) unable to evaluate the wealth of information available on the internet. With my own children, I have stressed the importance of determining the quality of sources, and checking any information found on the internet against print sources of high reliabilty wherever possible. This is especially true in matters historical, which are near to my heart and interest.
>>Everyone seems to be focusing on the Kerry aspect of this piece. I think the really interesting point is the one about the graduates of the elite colleges all wanting to go into communications, but without a clue what they have to say.
What makes you think those two parts of this commentary are unrelated? My "take" is that Peggy knew what she was doing very well, when putting both these items in this piece.
the chief reasons for these kids wanting to go into communication are two--
1) They have a useless liberal-arts degree. They have to go to some kind of grad school.
2) Communications provides scope and stage for the Vain.
I think you have to remember the "herd" in which this thoroughbred runs. Peggy's friends' kids are likely to have journalists/tv producers/news professionals as parents. Therefore, the kids she's in contact with are more oriented towards the arts than the sciences. While that's a bit of a generalization, I think there's some truth to it.
The Ivy League schools have excellent and very full and successful programs in the sciences. There are lots of Ivy League kids who want to engineer, build things and solve biotechnological problems.
Of course, the key is that all of them are leaving their Ivy League schools with a leftist perspective - imagine that in the realm of bio-ethics, nuclear/weapons defense system planning, etc.
Thanks, friend.
**I wondered if the loss of a kind of national manliness, or force, tends to coincide in modern nations with a rise in expertise in the delicate arts.**
Could be its own thread!
**Great quote about Kerry:
"he's a haircut with a person attached."**
LOL! So true!
Thanks for your very thoughtful responses...
"Philosophy is the handmaid of theology", as they say.
I have become a Thomist in my old age. After a lifetime of seeking, I've found nothing better.
"Nothing can be known or communicated." - Gorgias
Thanks for the ping!
If there is a better, brighter, and more intelligent voice for American Conservatism, I don't know who it is. Not even Rush, Sean or Glenn can punch a point home like this lady.
Thanks for the post. Truth never read so well. :)
Owl
"I love Peggy" bump!
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