Dear Intelligent American,
Surely you heard the big March Madness news? Minnesota State beat Nova Southeastern, 88-85, on a last-second three-pointer, to win the Men’s NCAA basketball championship.
Oh yeah: We’re talking Division Two. And if Division Three is your bag, Trine triumphed over Hampden-Sydney, 69-61. And get this: the Division Two women’s championship was won by . . . that same Minnesota State, which bested Texas Woman’s, 89-73. Let’s complete this: The Division Three women’s title went to NYU, which beat Smith 51-41.
To quote the late Billy Mays: “But wait! There’s more!” True, there is no NCAA Division Four, but there is the for-pipsqueaks NAIA, which too has a national hoops championship. This year the title was taken by Freed-Hardeman University (in Henderson, TN), which scored the game’s final 10 points to best Oklahoma’s Langston University. And in another thriller, this one courtesy of the ladies, Dordt University (from Sioux Center, IA) came out on top in a 57-53 championship win over the Great Falls, MT-hailing University of Providence.
Hey, about the NIT?! Come back next week and we’ll tell ya.
Now, before we belly up to the excerpts and links, the last edition of Civil Thoughts drew attention to Charles Kesler’s important essay in Claremont Review of Books, “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism.” The essay has spawned responses at The American Mind. Read fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney’s here, and David Goldman’s here. More are to come.
CT Is Going on a 14-Excerpt Run!
1. At The Wall Street Journal, amiga Ericka Andersen reveals the moral difficulties raised by in vitro fertilization, and the options that are much more “natural” and religiously palatable. From the op-ed:
When someone creates excess embryos, the options are to destroy them, donate them to science, offer them to other hopeful parents or freeze them indefinitely. With over one million frozen embryos stored in the U.S., many couples pay for storage for years, unsure of how to proceed.
Like the justices of Alabama’s Supreme Court, I’ve come to see these embryos as children. Because I believe in their humanity, my own embryos will be donated to others who are struggling with infertility. Maybe one day they’ll have a chance to see the sun.
I left other viable fertility options on the table because no one told me about them. Later, I learned about natural-cycle IVF, which involves using a woman’s natural cycle to retrieve a single egg, inseminating it outside the body, then transferring it back to the uterus when it has the best chance of success. The procedure creates one embryo at a time, making it an appealing option for those of us who believe that life begins at conception.
2. Play Ball! At The American Conservative, John Rossi looks at a new book that tracks New York City’s rise and fall through the successes of its Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers baseball franchises. From the piece:
Ruth personified the New York of the 1920s when the city reached its Golden Age, and Baker enjoys nothing more than long disquisitions about the expansion of the city—the growth of its skyscrapers, the development of new neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, the expansion of the subway so that, by 1930, 91 percent of New Yorkers were within a half mile of a station.
New York teams dominated both leagues in the 1920s, winning 11 pennants among the three teams. Baker argues as many others have that the 1927 Yankees were the greatest team in baseball history, outscoring their opponents by almost 400 runs. Ruth out-homered every other team in the American League, while he and Lou Gehrig hit one less home run than the Giants team that led the National League in circuit clouts.
In what I believe is an overstatement, Baker argues that New York never recovered from the Great Depression. “The city would get rich again,” he writes, “grow again. But the easy confidence in its genius that had existed before the great slump was gone for good.” Surely in the post-war era up to the early 1960s, New York dominated as it had in the ’20s, culturally, financially, and certainly in baseball terms. In the decade and half after World War II, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers won a collective 19 pennants.
3. At the Catholic Education Resource Center, John Cuddeback explains that we are in a time of disembodiment in relationships. From the piece:
First, to what extent have we let digital connection, due to its ease and convenience, reduce and replace the irreplaceable: bodily presence with our friends, and even family?
Second, to what extent is it reasonable and what extent unreasonable to utilize digital connection in lieu of bodily presence given the challenges of our current life situation?
Part of this complex problem is how digital practices have prompted us to try to do more things and maintain more relationships than is reasonably possible. We have come to think of bodily limitations as negative, rather than as intrinsic to the gift and plan of human life. Here the words of Felicia Wu Song in her book Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age strike a chord:
"Together the design and norms of digital life ultimately immerse us in a story about the human condition that bends our assumptions to regard embodiment as a nuisance . . ."
4. At Tablet Magazine, Walter Russell Mead sees twilight in the now-ending century of the Wonks. From the article:
The endlessly rising demand for more experts with higher degrees of expertise had profound social consequences, leading inexorably to a kind of society in which “merit” rather than ancestry or wealth was increasingly the key to advancement. If you are a fumble-fingered incompetent with a limited attention span, it doesn’t matter how rich or well-connected your parents are—you still can’t be a neurosurgeon or an air traffic controller.
Advocates of the rising professional meritocracy pointed to Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of a “natural aristocracy” of talent to underline its grounding in both democratic theory and natural law. But merit in the emerging technocratic society of the Industrial Revolution was a highly specialized thing. This is not merit as traditionally conceived in Western civilization. This was not about achieving a holistic ideal of human merit in which wisdom, judgment, virtu, and intellectual excellence are all appropriately considered.
Merit, for the 20th century, was increasingly dissociated from the older ideals. It was more and more conflated with the kind of personality and talent set that define what we call a “wonk.” Wonks do well on standardized tests. They pass bar examinations with relative ease, master the knowledge demanded of medical students, and ace tests like the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Wonks are not rebels or original thinkers. Wonks follow rules. What makes someone a successful wonk is the possession of at least moderate intelligence plus copious quantities of what the Germans call Sitzfleisch (literally, sit-flesh, the ability to sit patiently at a desk and study for long periods of time).
5. No, the topic ain’t at the top of everyone’s agenda, but at Reason, Jay Derr analyzes how America’s inland waterways—vital to commerce (and didn’t Honest Abe work a flatboat on the Big Muddy?)—can be improved and better funded. From the article:
Given the importance of the inland waterway system to supply chains across the country, it must be revitalized in a more cost-effective manner that doesn’t unduly burden general taxpayers. Currently, barge vessels pay a small lockage fee that covers a dwindling percentage of capital costs. However, taxpayers pay for 100% of the inland waterway system’s operations and maintenance costs, as well as an increasing share of new construction capital costs. Creating a sustainable revenue source will benefit the inland waterway system’s users and consumers as a whole. This move begins the process of shifting more of the burden to inland waterway users.
Further, long-term infrastructure should be financed and not funded, because it stretches limited resources further. One potential financing option is public-private partnerships (P3s). In addition to stretching the funds, P3s transfer risks—specifically construction cost overruns, late completion, and operations as well as maintenance of the locks.
By modernizing the inland waterway system through a new funding and financing mechanism, Congress could improve the efficiency and reliability of U.S. waterways.
6. At Plough Magazine, Peter Mommsen contemplates man’s stewardship of nature, the sadness of creatures facing fate, and whether nature’s laws should prevail. From the piece:
To read the book of nature, you have to actually pay attention—go out and fill your gaze with the stars, or a forest, or a deer. Without this practice, the book is illegible, and it is difficult to make sense of the Psalmist’s claim that the “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Similarly, it will be hard to follow the apostle Paul’s argument that “what can be known about God is plain to [human beings], because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”
How can that be if nature is as cruel as evolutionary biology tells us? Far from manifesting peaceful unity, it is as “red in tooth and claw” as Darwin described, possessing not only beauty and order but also pathogens and parasites. “All life is struggle” is only partly false; the ruthlessness the Nazis admired is undeniably there.
Though he predated Darwin by fourteen centuries, Augustine of Hippo wrestled with similar questions, wondering in his Confessions, for example, how a good God could have created repulsive insects. It’s worth noting that Augustine never regarded the book of nature as showing a static perfection, all harmony and innocence. Instead—to paraphrase Rowan Williams—Augustine described natural phenomena as emerging from a world in flux, where nothing other than God is changeless or deathless, and competing forces are always at work upon one another. We must acknowledge, Augustine thought, that not everything in nature is orderly, purposive, or beautiful; yet nature shows a remarkable tendency toward order, purpose, and beauty, as if drawn toward them. It is in this tendency, he believed, that we perceive the hand of a good Creator.
7. At Law & Liberty, Jack Andrews explains how leftist ideologues do double duty as moral relativists and intolerant absolutists. From the essay:
If postmodern leftism assumes that all values are culturally contingent, then we can say whatever we want about a given set of values—in that case, I can say something’s right for me and us, without it being correct in some deeper metaphysical way. In that case, you don’t need to do your homework in any meaningful way, or show your work. You can will the belief into existence, in a Nietzschean sense. Thus, it is no wonder that leftist intellectuals exhibit such rabid zeal when discussing things like racism, sexism, and transphobia. In an argument, it’s often the case that the one who’s secure in the truth of their position will stay calm, while his insecure interlocutor will begin to raise his voice, hoping that his passion and anger can substitute for his argument. And if you know, in some deep sense, that the only thing you have on your side is the volume and ferocity of your voice, you’re less likely to let the argument stand on its own terms. Absolutism becomes a performance—a performance meant to disguise a deeper relativism that would invalidate your entire argument.
In this way, it doesn’t make sense to term the woke defenders of Hamas either relativists or absolutists. They’re both. They don’t care about formal reasoning. And, like Nietzsche, they certainly don’t care about objective truth. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus must choose to sail close to one of two opposite monsters, Scylla and Charybdis. Leo Strauss wrote of how Aristotle and Plato avoided the “Scylla of ‘absolutism’ and the Charybdis of ‘relativism’” by charting a third way. Postmodernists somehow manage to escape neither, but in fact, embrace both.
8. What Divided Nation? At The Free Press, Ben Kawaller presses for political leanings amongst the inebriati, and finds less disharmony than one might suspect. From the beginning of the piece:
I recently went to Mardi Gras and spent a couple days committing the ultimate faux pas: talking politics at a party. Knowing that in vino veritas—or at least, in vino ludicrum (thank you, Google Translate)—my plan was to ask people, in their inebriation, what they would change about America if they were in charge. I figured these interrogations would yield some insights into the collective psyche of a polarized nation.
The primary insight: what polarized nation? Polarized suggests a clustering around the extremes—and while I spoke to a few enthusiastically left- and right-wing partygoers, they were at least matched by people describing themselves as moderate, independent, or completely disengaged. And many of the partisans were lukewarm. One black gay guy described himself as “liberal. . . ish.” When I guessed that one twentysomething boatyard worker from Maine leaned conservative he said, “Meh. Sure.” One elderly black woman who loved Obama and JFK resisted the label liberal entirely, as did two local high school seniors, though they rejected the word conservative as well (“I feel like that’s just so aggressive.”). When I asked another woman if she was conservative, she was stunned (though her reflexes seemed generally dulled). “I’m gay!” she told me. Did that mean she was a liberal? “I don’t know,” she slurred, then added, “Your camerawoman’s kinda hot.” This was hardly a population seething with pre–civil war rage.
Perhaps that’s no shocker—this was a bacchanal, not a constitutional convention—but you would think that if we were on the brink of a “national divorce,” at least someone would have said something like, “The problem is liberals,” or “Everything would be great without Republicans.” In fact, the overwhelming response to “How do we fix America?” was a plea for greater kindness and less division.
9. Easter Thoughts: At The Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil explains the profound historical, political, and sociological importance of Christ’s Resurrection. From the article:
Christianity turned the values of the Pagan Roman world upside-down. The Romans considered the early Christians subversives—many called them “atheists” because they didn’t worship any pagan gods—and put them to death for refusing to worship the emperor. After some emperors adopted the faith, Emperor Julian attempted to revive paganism, but lamented that the Christian ethic had transformed the empire.
“It is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism,” Julian wrote to a pagan priest of Galatia in 362 A.D. Those who believed in the Resurrection established the first hospitals, and Christianity spread rapidly during Roman plagues, as pagans fled the cities, but Christians stayed and tended to the sick, risking death but saving souls.
Rodney Stark, a now-deceased social sciences professor at Baylor University and author of the book “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,” told PJ Media in 2017 that without the Resurrection, “we would still be in a world of mystery and probably in a world of repressive empires.”
10. At National Review, Brian Stewart reports on what prompts “TED Talks” to bring out the gag. From the article:
And this is where we return to the pusillanimity of TED. In January, TED caused an uproar by announcing that it would host Bill Ackman as one of the main speakers at its April conference. Ackman is the controversial hedge-fund manager who was instrumental in pushing out Harvard’s president, who was forced to resign from her office (though she still teaches at Harvard) over her record of plagiarism and also allegations that she was insufficiently concerned about antisemitism. Another person invited to be a keynote speaker at the conference was the journalist Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press and a prominent defender of the Jewish state. A handful of TED fellows promptly resigned, accusing the organization of taking an anti-Palestinian position and aligning itself “with enablers and supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
It is not clear how TED will navigate the situation if it becomes more dire, but there is little reason for confidence that it will stand for principle. Anyone familiar with the breakdown in the culture of free speech, and the way that “anti-racism” has merged into latent or blatant antisemitism, will not be surprised by the controversy over the demonization of Israel. And anyone familiar with TED’s travails of late will not be surprised that hostility to free speech has arisen from within its ranks. A precedent had recently been set by high-ranking TED officials proving that certain ideas, no matter how respectable, could be justifiably curtailed in the face of a mob.
11. More NR: Patrick Brown body-slams municipal overregulation and how it stymies community friendliness. From the piece:
Washington State was on the verge of opening the door to more Central Perks or options beyond the ubiquitous Starbucks. . . . A bill sponsored by state representative Mark Klicker (R., Walla Walla) would have required that cities and towns in the Evergreen State permit small neighborhood cafés—defined as being under 500 square feet, with no drive-throughs or more than two parking spots—in residential areas.
Klicker’s rationale was simple: “Having cafes and small grocers in neighborhood settings has had a positive impact on communities for decades. . . . Small, neighborhood cafes create a welcoming environment for everyone to come together and strengthen community bonds, which makes our communities feel safer and more connected.” The gang at Central Perk would approve.
His bill wouldn’t have mandated any public spending—just allowed entrepreneurs to identify areas that might benefit from a little more commerce and camaraderie and see if they could make it work. It passed the Washington house of representatives unanimously.
But it was a bridge too far for the Association of Washington Cities, the advocacy group that represents the leaders of the state’s cities and towns at the capitol. It lobbied allies in the state senate to strike the bill, expressing concerns about the state overriding cities’ zoning decisions. Never mind that the AWC had recently worked with the legislature on similar concerns around lawmakers’ recent passage of a “strippers’ bill of rights”—influenced by the AWC, a Democratic senator introduced an amendment making the bill voluntary, taking the teeth out of it.
12. At VeroNews.com, Samantha Baita reports on a Floridian fundraiser that mixed patriotism and affection for Man’s Best Friend—all for the benefit of those in need of canine service. From the story:
The beautiful Pointe West clubhouse was radiant with red, white and blue, and the hum of conversation and music filled the air, as the 100-plus attendees of the third annual Patriots for Puppies fundraiser—dogs and humans alike—mixed and mingled in support of Dogs for Life.
The Vero Beach-based nonprofit is dedicated to training and providing service dogs to assist with hearing, mobility and PTSD to veterans and individuals with disabilities in Indian River and St. Lucie counties. They also provide therapy dogs for first responders and school resource programs and offer veteran PTSD recovery and support groups, including one for female veterans and first responders.
Among the guests, as a heartwarming example of what DFL has accomplished since its founding in 2001, were uniformed active and retired members of the military with their DFL-provided service dog partners, as well as others who have benefited from DFL service dog training, and volunteers escorting pooches still in various stages of training.
Lucky 13. At TomKlingenstein.com, Jason Richwine argues that the time has come for an immigration moratorium. From the piece:
Another difference is that the Great Wave actually ended. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, sharply curtailed immigration for 40 years and helped facilitate assimilation. Those who dismiss concerns about today’s immigrants using analogies to the Irish are rarely in favor of any such restriction now to encourage assimilation. On the contrary, most seem unbothered by the Census Bureau’s projections of record-breaking immigration throughout this century.
A second reason the Irish Retort fails is that its premise is wrong: The Irish did not fully assimilate. No group does. Research across a wide range of academic fields finds that immigrants and their descendants do not become clones of the native population. Instead, as Jones puts it, they “transplant” key cultural values from the Old Country into their new one. The historian David Hackett Fischer observed that even the original British settlers in North America differed among themselves in their approaches to education, civics, trust, crime, and government structure. The differences between, say, Puritan-settled New England and Scotch-Irish-settled Appalachia are still apparent today.
As new immigrants followed the initial settlers, each wave imported cultures that permanently changed the United States. For an illustration, consider that the level of trust and civic engagement among European American groups correlates strongly with the level of trust and civic engagement among corresponding groups in Europe. Put concretely, Sweden has a more civic culture than Ireland, which itself has a more civic culture than Italy. In the United States, the same order emerges: Swedish Americans are more civic than Irish Americans, who are more civic than Italian Americans. Once we understand the reality of cultural persistence, then “They said the same thing about the Irish!” becomes an obviously inadequate defense of mass immigration.
Bonus. Blasting from the past, Modern Age republishes the great Richard Weaver’s reflections on the great American curmudgeon/humorist, H.L. Mencken. From the beginning of the piece:
Henry Louis Mencken may fairly be accounted the most consistent champion of individual liberty this country has ever seen. Coming to the fullness of his powers at a time when the nation first ventured into the role of international Messiah, and when it was giving, not the first, but probably the most extraordinary, exhibition of its capacity for fantasy thinking in national Prohibition, he laid about him with a zest which no one who lived through the Twenties can forget. And now that we are beset with equally great if not greater political grotesqueries (a phrase which I believe would have met his approval), those who long for an order of sanity and liberty may well echo the famous line of Wordsworth and cry, “Mencken, thou should’st be living at this hour.”
The recently published Letters of H. L. Mencken give an opportunity to refresh our memory of this vivid personality. What the reflective reader will discover here is another source of proof that Mencken was essentially a conservative critic of life and letters. Such estimate could amaze those who mistake his sweeping diatribes as evidence of a radical temper. But it is necessary to see things in the right relation: the features of American life which he attacked were radical aberrations from conservative common sense; his frequently violent criticisms showed a zeal, traditionally pardonable in any apostle of fairness, to expose folly, pretense, imposture, and self-promotion.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. The Center For Civil Society hosts an important webinar on Thursday, April 25, on “American Jews, Philanthropic Traditions, and Harsh New Realities.” Your Humble Correspondent will interview a trio of experts—Alexandra Rosenberg, senior director of development at Tikvah, Rebecca Sugar, author and longtime leader in Jewish philanthropic management, and Rabbi Rob Thomas, cybersecurity expert and philanthropist—about an ancient faith and its unique practices—and philosophy—of charity, conducted in and contributing to the tapestry of a country supposedly intolerant of intolerance, but now stained by repeated examples of elite antisemitism. You’ll want to register (the webinar is free, takes place, via Zoom, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern)—easily done right here.
Due. Mark your calendar! A new AmPhil “Scotch Talk” will be coming at you (via Zoom) on Tuesday, April 16, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern), with the quartet of Jeremy Beer, John LaBarbara, Jason Lloyd, and Boaz Witbeck on hand to share buckets of wisdom about finding and fostering Major Gifts. Get the ice, the tumbler, and the libation ready—but make sure you sign up, which you can do right here.
Tre. Save those dates! October 23-24. And mark the location! Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. Why? Because that’s when and where the Center for Civil Society will be hosting its 2024 Givers, Doers, & Thinkers conference, this one on “K to Campus: How the Education Reform Movement Can Reshape Higher Ed.” Agenda and speakers will be announced soon, but registering, getting info, and all such stuff can be done and found right here.
Quattro. At Philanthropy Daily, Jack Salmon explains how President Biden’s proposed budget is a threat to philanthropy. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Where does the catcher sit when he is hungry?
A: Behind the plate.
A Dios
All five of Mr. and Mrs. Yours Truly’s children graduated from the University of Connecticut, so GO UCONN!
May We Be Moved to Seek Wisdom,
Jack Fowler, who is shooting threes from jfowler@amphil.com.
