Dear Intelligent American,
First—or is it firstly?—should you not receive this weekly missive by email, consider doing so. Go to CivilThoughts.com to sign up. Then, every Friday afternoon, the newest edition shall appear in your inbox.
Next—or is it nextly?—we remember Sister Honoria, who frequently told us sixth-graders, “A word to the wise is sufficient,” which missed the target because it conjured thoughts of potato chips. Given that you, Dear Reader, are well past your elementary years, and grasp the aphorism’s meaning, do, if you are wise, and especially if you are a Giver, Doer, or Thinker, join the Center for Civil Society at Pepperdine University this October 23–24 for the vital gathering: K to Campus: How the Education Reform Movement Can Reshape Higher Ed.
Last—or is it lastly?—many sites, such as The Lion, are reporting on a UConn student who is suing the Hartford, Connecticut, public-school system because she cannot read, cannot write, and can barely add. Pushed through K-12, somehow admitted into the state’s premier public university, this is sheer absurdity, tragedy, cruelty, and . . . nuts. Think about this young woman’s reality—that a decade-plus of public education in America has resulted in utter ignorance, which, somehow, proved no impediment to college admission—as you register for the conference.
Nowly, on to the Main Event
1. TomKlingenstein.com, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney explains the totalitarian foundation of that much-bandied phrase, “the right side of history.” From the essay:
In the 20th century, the integrity of language came under systematic assault from totalitarian ideologues committed to the transformation of human nature and society. Cherished old words and concepts with tried-and-true meanings (“oldspeak,” as the totalitarians called them in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) gave way to “newspeak,” an ideological distortion of language that was woefully “wooden” (i.e., jargon-laden) and that deliberately undermined the human capacity to understand the most elementary realities before us. The age-old distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, were replaced by an ideology of “progress” where being “on the right side of History” is all that really matters. Being “reactionary” became the worst thing imaginable, requiring “reeducation” if not elimination.
Whatever served the cause of revolutionary transformation—however violent or mendacious—was said to be right and just, and thus obligatory. “Liberty,” “equality,” “peace,” “democracy,” and “justice” took on new, ideological meanings. All too often, this development went unappreciated by progressives and fellow travelers in the Western world. They, too, had come to accept the pernicious ideological distinction between “progress” and “reaction.” This distinction served to justify the unjustifiable, such as mass repression against those who were deemed “class enemies.”
2. At City Journal, despite the new claims of supposed institutional “neutrality,” Neetu Arnold worries that higher-ed leaders remain intent on engaging in ideology. From the piece:
Since the atrocities of last October 7 and the subsequent campus unrest, 18 institutions have adopted institutional neutrality policies that resemble Penn’s. Their announcements have garnered cautious praise from defenders of academic freedom and free speech. Though it’s obvious that universities want to save face after their failure to condemn unequivocally Hamas’s massacre of civilians, there’s hope that these statements might still be a move in the right direction despite the flawed reasons behind their origin.
But the reasons that universities are taking these steps do matter. True institutional neutrality involves a deeper commitment than simply refraining from commenting on political issues. Given how often administrators place their thumbs on the scales of various decisions, ranging from student admissions to faculty hiring, achieving genuine neutrality would require schools to evaluate and overhaul a host of politically biased policies and practices. If administrators’ only motivation for adopting institutional neutrality is public relations, then it is unlikely they will fix these deeper issues.
3. At National Review, Elliott Abrams and Corban Teague propose a conservative “human rights” agenda. From the essay:
When Reagan entered the White House, he was under no illusions that there could be “peaceful coexistence” with the great-power adversary he faced. As spelled out in a 1981 State Department memo written by one of us, human rights—specifically, fundamental political freedoms—were at the heart of the Cold War conflict. The primary dividing line between the American and Soviet visions for the world was defined by those countries’ “attitudes toward freedom,” and it was the Soviet Union that was “the major threat to liberty in the world.” The Reagan administration recognized that human rights had to be central to America’s fight against the Soviets, but also that the U.S. needed to go beyond addressing individual cases and making speeches. As the introduction to the State Department’s 1981 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices stated, the goal should be not to settle for a handful of small wins such as freeing a political prisoner here or there, important as each case was on its own, but “to encourage conditions in which new political prisoners are not taken” and “to assist in the gradual emergence of free political systems” in which human rights would be respected.
Reagan recognized that such an ambitious human-rights agenda had to be backed by power. The Soviets were never going to be persuaded of freedom’s merits by flowery rhetoric or well-crafted arguments. It was after all a competition between great powers with irreconcilable visions for the world, and it required power to ensure that the side favoring human rights and freedom came out on top. Despite the horrified palpitations of his critics in the human-rights establishment, Reagan understood that this included the need for a stronger American military. Far from hindering human rights, U.S. military power was necessary for adversary and ally alike to take America’s prioritization of the issue seriously.
4. At The European Conservative, Jonathon Van Maren celebrates the 90th birthday of Wendell Berry, whom he calls “the greatest living American writer.” From the encomium:
I’ve always thought that Wendell Berry is precisely the sort of American of whom the Founding Fathers were thinking when they drafted the documents that created a new nation and considered who would inherit the land. Berry is a farmer philosopher and a countryman novelist who has farmed his ancestral lands in Kentucky with his wife Tanya for decades. During that time, he has written more than two dozen volumes of poetry, almost 40 works of non-fiction, 12 novels, and dozens of short stories detailing life in the fictional town of Port William, based on his hometown of Port Royal.
I readily admit that I am not a literary critic, and I am a fan rather than a scholar of Berry’s work. When I first discovered his Port William stories, I ploughed through them all inside of a year. I plan to reread them all. Berry’s fiction is not only a record of rural life and the slow death of agricultural America, but also a record of the interior lives of Americans before we outsourced our thinking to digital devices and absorbed our worldviews from screens. His novels lack the frantic pace of so many of his contemporaries; reading them, I had to slow my own mind and detach from the mile-a-minute culture wars to match the pace of the men and women of Port William. Always, his stories left me feeling refreshed.
5. At Quillette, Sean McMeekin describes the historical, pre-Marx roots of Communism. From the piece:
Communism as a ruling doctrine is a relatively recent phenomenon in historical terms, dating back just over a century—or, if we count parties bearing the name, such as the Communist League of Marx and Engels (c. 1847–48), about 175 years. But the idea of material or social equality lying at the heart of Communist theory traces back deep into antiquity, and it is worth examining the different strands of thought that have informed and inspired modern Communists. . . .
Speaking to the individual soul rather than to the Greeks’ pagan philosopher kings, Jesus warned followers soon known as Christians that it would “be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and he advised one wealthy petitioner, who asked him what he must do to attain eternal life, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”
Generations of Christian saints, inspired by the example of Martin of Tours (AD 316–97), who died on a bare floor clothed in rags, have taken Christ’s words to heart, renounced their material possessions, and devoted their lives to helping the needy—to charity, as we now call it. As Saint Martin himself preached, a true Christian must act as “the helper of the lowliest, the protector of the weak, the shelter of the hopeless, the savior of the rejected.” In this way, early Christians introduced to the world the novel, counterintuitive idea that the weak, the poor, and the humble had as much human value as great statesmen, mighty warriors, and their wealthy patrons. If Christ was right, the meek might even find true salvation in the afterlife, while the selfish rich were judged and suffered the torments of the damned.
6. At the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Walt Gardner raises an eyebrow to the idea that anyone would want to be a college president. From the piece:
The job of college president is clearly not what it used to be. Today, success requires the tact of a diplomat, sterling scholarship, and the ability to connect with students. It’s a rare person who checks all of those boxes, which is why high turnover persists. It’s also why it’s not enough to say that rules about campus protests will be strictly enforced. That’s meaningless until law- and rule-breakers actually get what’s in store for them.
A large part of the blame rests on the boards of trustees that approve a new president. They need to place more emphasis on experience dealing with unruly students rather than hiring academic stars. Although they are not as visible as college presidents, trustees are more powerful. As one observer noted, the key to their success is to “listen to every constituency, but be beholden to none.” Trustees are ultimately responsible. If they won’t take a more active role in what takes place on campus, then accreditors and elected officials must step in.
Trustees in the past have shown they can do their job. In November 2011, for example, the Penn State Board of Trustees fired Graham Spanier, the university president, and Coach Joe Paterno over a sexual-abuse scandal on campus. In doing so, the board made it clear that leadership had arrived. It’s this kind of action, and that of Father Theodore Hesburgh at Notre Dame, that is sorely needed as the fall semester progresses. That trustees of Brown University even considered a divestment vote on Israel this fall is evidence that capitulation to radicals is still alive.
7. At Tablet Magazine, Malka Simkovich contends there is a Cold War against the Jews. From the piece:
In November 2023, I became involved in a small community of Jewish academics who were concerned about these developments. Rather than expending our effort on debating with academic associations, we decided to focus on developing one of our own. In January 2024, I joined 22 North American scholars on a solidarity mission to visit academic campuses in Israel. Our group consisted of faculty members representing Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College, as well as Emory University, Bard College, Washington University at St. Louis, and other colleges across North America.
Our visits to campuses across Israel were sobering. As we listened to Israeli professors and administrators share story after story about their exclusion from global academic communities, we became increasingly attuned to the situation’s tragic irony. The same faculty and administrators who had been boycotted as progenitors of apartheid had devoted their careers to producing pluralist campuses. . . .
The trip convinced us that we are dealing with a global issue that runs not only up and down the educational ladder, but also around the globe. Excluded from journals, conferences, and public gatherings, pressured to change their public writings to conform with others’ sensitivities, and gaslit by administrators who inform them that all of this has nothing to do with antisemitism, we had discovered that to be a Jew in academic spaces was to embody provocation—and that provocation, we were told, had to be suppressed for the sake of everyone’s comfort.
8. At First Things, Molly DeVito contemplates the mirror image of new life, and death, and that both can have immediacy, and uncertainty. From the piece:
Birth and death have much in common; they are mirror images. Both are inevitable. Once a child has been conceived, he or she must be born into the world. Many women who haven’t given birth by their due date lament, “I'll be pregnant forever!” This, of course, is impossible. Similarly, many act as if they’ll live forever. My aunt always says, “We all know everyone dies, but no one really believes it is going to happen to him.” But whether we believe it or not, death comes for us all.
Our disbelief is partly due to the uncertain timing. We do not know the hour of our death. And while we can, to some degree, estimate the time of birth, it is never entirely within our control. When my neighbor went into labor with her third child, she told her doctor, “I’m busy throwing a birthday party for my daughter; I'm sure it's nothing.” It wasn’t nothing; she eventually had to rush to the hospital, and her son was born that night.
While uncertain timing makes for some amusing birth stories, it’s more sobering when death comes unexpectedly. A few years ago, my husband had a conversation with a dear elderly friend who lay on his deathbed. The friend, a lifelong agnostic, was asking questions about faith and the Church. He told my husband, “Well, I'll have to think about that. I think I still have some time left.” That night, he slipped into a coma and passed away.
9. At The Free Press, world-traveling Chris Arnade finds love for America everywhere. From the piece:
And it’s not just that American culture is everywhere; you also see spin-off versions of it wherever you travel. Every country now has a version of hip-hop, and while it is not always in English, it very much sounds like an American product, stylistically. A few years ago, I landed at the airport in Ulaanbaatar—the capital of Mongolia—and asked my cab driver to play whatever he wanted to listen to. He introduced me to Mongolian hip-hop, which sounds like it could have been made in the Bronx. So much for experiencing Tuvan throat singing.
Most people care about music and dancing and a really good television show a lot more than they care about politics. On my travels, I have found that people are not obsessed with current events, especially those beyond their borders; they are too busy trying to build the best life they can.
So I find it funny when people assume I must hear nonstop complaints about America’s behavior when I travel. I hang out in bars, not the sociology department of the nearest university, and I’ve never—not once—been greeted with anything other than generosity, curiosity, and fondness, even in places with strong historical reasons to dislike Americans, such as Vietnam and Jordan.
10. At National Affairs, Stephen Eide urges a serious and mold-breaking effort to save, fix, and uplift America’s many men in crisis. From the essay:
In the coming years, we will have to rely more heavily on social programs targeted at disadvantaged men. It's virtually unheard of to encounter a homeless-services provider these days who is scaling back operations, though this has happened at times in American history.
To be effective, these programs should serve an exclusively male clientele and, as much as possible, be led and staffed by men. Their two chief values should be steady employment in jobs outside the social-service sector, and old-fashioned sobriety.
Embracing steady employment means menial labor, which is something many social-service professionals, if they hail from an upper-middle-class, college-educated background, are unenthusiastic about. This leads them to emphasize job training over work experience.
Yet formal job-training programs suffer from the same defect as any institutional response to social challenges: They are artificial. Hard skills—those that can be gained through training, such as licensure and educational credentials—may be necessary for upward mobility, but soft skills—making eye contact; putting up with a short-tempered boss; showing up every day on time, even when it rains—are foundational. Unlike job training, virtually all on-the-books employment, and even much off-the-books employment, helps people develop the soft skills necessary to find and keep a job.
11. At UnHerd, Ian Birrell turns the water cannon on the troubling philanthropy of YouTube big deal MrBeast, and others who scheme to make a nice ROI from exploiting Africa’s poor. From the article:
This is damaging—and not just because it might hinder the Amazon tie-up that lifts Donaldson to another level. MrBeast is built on his brand of benevolent niceness, with profits supposedly going “towards making the world a better place”. Having started out as a typical YouTube goofball, he became an internet superstar with acts of outlandish altruism. He doles out cars, houses, islands and yachts as well as cash. His videos boast of adopting a South African orphanage, helping paralysed dogs run, building 100 wells in Africa, feeding 10,000 people for Thanksgiving, paying a salary to everyone in a Ugandan village for a year. They have eye-catching titles such as: “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time” and “We Brought Water to Kenya”. . . .
Yet consider some of those stunts. Few things appeal more to well-meaning Westerners than needy orphans, so there is a boom business in unregulated and fake orphanages in poorer nations. Some are squalid, others fronts for abuse. Children are often lured from families with false promises of money, schooling or security. One recent Australian study examined this phenomenon of “orphanage trafficking” that “fabricated narratives” to attract funds from donors. Such concerns were raised by Lumos—a group founded by J.K. Rowling to end institutionalisation—with statements addressing MrBeast’s counterproductive focus: “Many orphanages across the world are set up to exploit children for profit, exposing children to harm and abuse. By promoting orphanages, even well-intentioned ones, we promote the work of those that are not, continuing the cycle of exploitation.”
12. At The American Mind, Emina Melonic finds that the nexus of food and health must also intersect with community. From the piece:
But there are other elements that typically go unnoticed in our discussions of health: how we take care of our bodies and minds is inextricably connected to both Aristotelian moderation and a food culture that should lead one to form lasting connections with others.
A tunnel-vision focus on “getting healthy” will create an obsession that will greatly diminish our relationship with others, be they friends or family. There is even a name for it: orthorexia nervosa. Unlike other eating disorders, it may be borne out of good intentions, but counting calories can turn into an obsessive urge to have complete control over food selection and preparation. Such a need is not necessarily related to weight, but rather with finding the purest of ingredients, rendering eating and food a question of metrics, chemistry, and perpetual bodily surveillance.
Holiday meals and celebrations have been ruined by family members who insist that any food other than what they have chosen is poisonous and toxic. They claim allergies, to be on a perpetual diet, or that “I’m not that hungry.” They sit at the dinner table, staring at their clean plate, perhaps slightly embarrassed but mostly indignant about their dysfunction. Such people have essentially alienated themselves from any sense of community and connection with others. They often inflict their own children with such neuroses—one wonders what will become of children raised on a steady diet of joylessness and fear?
Lucky 13. At Parsippany Focus, Frank Cahill reports on a New Jersey fundraiser that helped fill the food pantry. From the beginning of the article:
The 4th Annual FUNdRAISER for the Parsippany Food Pantry marked a milestone for the community-driven initiative. This year’s fundraiser, spearheaded by nine-year-old Vivan Bhattacharya, raised a record $1,800, which was officially handed over to Michele Picone, Director of Health and Human Services at the Parsippany Food Pantry. Picone, clearly impressed by the young organizers’ efforts, stated, “This is a record,” underscoring the success of this year’s event.
For four consecutive years, Vivan has taken the lead in organizing the FUNdRAISER, demonstrating an impressive commitment to supporting the community’s most vulnerable. The initiative has gained momentum each year, with growing participation from local children and support from key community leaders like Mayor James R. Barberio and Councilman Frank Neglia. Both officials attended the event and encouraged the young volunteers, acknowledging the importance of cultivating a spirit of community service in Parsippany’s youngest generation.
Bonus. At National Catholic Register, Andy Fowler, CT nepo, makes the case for a patron saint of baseball. From the article:
As of today, there is no official patron saint of baseball. St. Rita is often cited, not so much for her athletic prowess or love for the national pastime (since the 15th-century nun lived several hundred years before the game’s invention), but for her connection to the 2002 film, The Rookie.
While she is a powerful intercessor, Blessed Michael McGivney—a 19th-century Connecticut parish priest on the path to canonization—has more of a claim to the title of patron saint of baseball. After all, he played the game. Moreover, the order he founded, the Knights of Columbus (K of C), has used baseball as a tool for evangelization and charity. Additionally, some of the game’s mightiest heroes have been members—like Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Nap Lajoie and Joe DiMaggio—who shaped the game into what it is today.
Baseball followed the Catholic priest throughout his life. While attending Our Lady of Angels Seminary at Niagara University, McGivney started in a game between Connecticut and New York seminarians where he batted clean-up, played left field and scored three runs. More significantly, he held the role of vice president for his squad, perhaps his first foray into founding and/or leading groups—skills he would implement when establishing the K of C in 1882.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Marie Enzaldo shares the good work of a nonprofit waging one corporal work of mercy—feeding the hungry—in Denver and Philadelphia. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Emma Spence puts a spotlight on Philly House, an aces nonprofit also embracing a critical corporal work of mercy—sheltering the homeless—in the City of Brotherly Love. Read it here.
Tre. At National Review, John J. Miller, in his always-terrific The Bookmonger podcast, interviews Jeremy Beer about his important new biography, Beyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest. You can listen here.
Quattro. Yours Truly will moderate a Givers, Doers, & Thinkers webinar (free, via Zoom, on Tuesday, November 19th, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.)—cheekily titled “Donor-Advised Fiends (and a Guide to Reliable Alternatives).” It’s determined to unpack how some donor-advised funds have gone astray, and how one still might find DAFs that are committed to honoring givers’ intent. Sign up here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: How did the nitwit break his leg raking leaves?
A: He fell out of the tree.
A Dios
It’s strange to label these things “a perfect storm.” Can murder, chaos, calamity, sin be perfect? Regardless, if you are snug somewhere, and have two mites or more in the couch cushions, they might be well spent on behalf of those enduring—as they will be for weeks, months, years—the perfect misery of the Armageddon inflicted on so many of our countrymen.
May He Who Calms the Seas Bring Comfort,
Jack Fowler, who is opening his wallet at jfowler@amphil.com.
