Jan 22
To Bradley Birzer and his article that reviews how Irving Babbit, a renowned literary critic, viewed the history of Europe and the French Revolution. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative.
Why is it that when conservatives look at the abuses of the French Revolution, they assign fault solely to the people and ideas that started the revolution as if the conditions that led to the Revolution had an insignificant effect on people? Though not mentioned in the above article, the same occurs when conservatives look at the October, 1917 Russian Revolution. The dictatorship that Lenin installed and Stalin fortified was only the fault of Marx even though the historian Orlando Figes pointed out that Lenin's idea of manhood came from Russian literature, not Marx, and that Russia was emerging out of the centuries-long dictatorship of the Tsars.
Without addressing the issue, the reason for that oversight can be found in the article above when reading Birzer's summary of Babbit's interpretation of the changes in Europe:
Mostly, the great humanist claimed, because of the rise of a romantic and mushy humanitarianism, one that desired the individual to throw off the so-called shackles of tradition, custom, mores, and norms, to revolt against the fathers and mothers and against all that one inherited. By doing so, the humanitarians had desired the liberation of the “beautiful souls” but, in reality unleashed a form of Promethean individualism
Even in that statement, there is nothing that is noted about the abuses, as seen in the French Revolution, that are attributed to the centuries of tradition that their ancestors bequeathed to them.
Why was there a French Revolution? It was because the traditions that were left to France smiled on those with wealth and power, the aristocracy, and on those who sided with the aristocracy and the Church--the Roman Church in particular.
So what if more and more people were struggling financially and with the acquiring of food being made more difficult and expensive. And so what that the 3rd Estate was getting a growing share of the tax burden to pay for wars. The abuses of the French Revolution, according to many conservatives, is to be blamed only on Enlightenment ideas, not the sufferings visited on the people by the nobility supported by the Church. An economic crisis and food shortage along with a shifting of the tax burden and a lack of political representation for the 3rd Estate, which was approximately 98% of the people, preceded the French Revolution. In short, many people were suffering under an authoritarian but distant regime.
Here is something that conservatives should consider when looking at the French Revolution. When people look to undo long-standing social injustices, they often have a phobic reaction to those injustices. And part of any phobic reaction is to conflate what can be accidentally associated with those injustices with actual causes of the injustices. In essence, because the first fear in any phobia is the fear of being able to distinguish what is an actual threat from that which is only a perceived threat, the reaction to long standing injustice often employs all-or-nothing thinking. Thus, because of the traditional way of life handed down to the 3rd Estate in France, whatever was learned and applied from the Enlightenment thinkers was interpreted with that type of thinking. We could look at the Russian Revolution hijacked by Lenin and see that the same way of thinking took place.
Thus, the first, and a very major, problem that is in the above article is the scapegoating of the Enlightenment because of the conservative refusal to look their "sacred" traditions and such as having as having any significant role in causing the conditions suffered by the 3rd Estate. For if conservatives did consider those conditions, they would have to admit that their much vaunted traditions and such and the rule of those with wealth and power, which was supported by the Church, were very flawed and thus should not be as highly regarded as conservatives want them to be.
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Jan 23
To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost trying to warn people of the dangers of public school. This appeared in Heidelblog.
First, Clark offers no statistical evidence that sexual assault in schools has been increasing let alone significantly increasing. Anecdotal evidence, though very disturbing, does not provide the evidence for Clark's accusations. The statistical evidence required to show a significant increase means one must do a great deal of statistical work.
Second, it seems that Clark would say that public schools are dangerous for kids outside of the sexual predator issue because of what is being taught--we should note that Clark does not provide evidence for what he says is being taught. Clark sets Critical Theory as opposing critical thought. But what is critical thought to Clark? Does critical thought mean that we accept traditional views of our nation and its place in history and the world? Doesn't Critical Theory teach us to not take the old status quo for granted but to examine much of what came with that old status quo that was previously assumed to be true by the privileged and sometimes even the marginalized? Why can't Critical Theory be seen as an example of critical thought.
Third, Clark's claim that were 7 stockbrokers charged with these claims in a short period of time then the story would be in huge print is pure speculation. It also shows a great deal of ignorance of the lives of many stockholders. The very sinful side of life lived by some stockholders was mentioned in the documentary Inside Job, if memory serves. It involved significant drug use sexual escapades. and yet we hear little if anything about that.
Clark is more than right in reporting these stories of sexual predators in schools and would be more than right to ask questions. But he does not provide the necessary statistical evidence to support his claims. Clark should also be leery, though, of associating sexual misconduct toward children with secularism or any non-conservative view of things considering the sexual misconduct toward children that exists in churches.
Fourth, and though I am not a big fan of how some things are taught in the public schools because of what I witnessed when teaching college. But we should note that educators sometimes feel forced to teach more than what Classical Education would require because of the failures of families in caring and properly instructing their own children. We need to understand that the failures we see in the public school system are due to the faulty decisions made by administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Administrators uncritically latch on to new perspectives and theories of education. Teachers, who know better, don't use their unions often enough to challenge the changes that administrators try to push through. A school district attorney told me that some parents pressure at least the high school in the district he was serving to give their students high enough grades so that they could get into the best colleges. Broken homes, which exist in all economic classes, can seriously harm student performance. Neighborhood schools in the lower economic school districts are handicapped by class sizes and inadequate resources. And there are too many students who are addicted to entertainment and fun who go along for the ride of fewer requirements and grade inflation.
Finally, Clarks seems to be associating conservative or the traditional views of things with what is acceptable to Christianity though he doesn't say that explicitly. In so doing, not only does he help divide the country more than it is, he helps isolates Christians from learning what should be learned from the world. History tells us of the reactions Luther and Calvin had to Heliocentricism. It is not just that they rejected the theory, they ridiculed those who promoted and accepted the idea as pretending to be smarter than God. We Christians continue that historical precedent today by our rejection of the human contributions to Climate Change or our embracing of conspiracy theories about the Covid 19 virus and the vaccines. It seems that we too often determine what is real by the acceptability of the outcomes we see they can produce.
Overall, though Clark brings up some important issues, he does so as an alarmist who seems to have already been promoting an agenda.
There is one other problem with associating the conservative or traditional view of things with what is acceptable to Christianity. That is that such can cause us to merge that view with our Christian faith and thus changing our Christian faith into a cultural religion.
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